New Work, Same Passion

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The Safety Net team at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) finished 2019 with a renewed sense of passion and purpose. We worked diligently to create informational resources, provide in-depth technical assistance to the field, and stay abreast of new topics and trends. We could not have done this work without you. We are grateful for the expertise and wisdom each of the coalitions, local programs, grant partners, survivors, and service providers bring each day.

Here are a few highlights from 2019:

The 7th Annual Technology Summit: This conference saw us hop in our DeLorean back to the 1980s. With technology ever-changing, this year’s summit kicked off with a focus on the importance of recognizing that even as new technologies impact our work, the behaviors used by perpetrators to abuse, harass, and harm are all still the same. Day one was spent working through strategies for safety planning, identifying what technology misuse looks like today, while also remembering that nothing can take away from good advocacy. The rest of the week was spent learning from experts in the field on new technologies, ways technologies affect communities at the margins, and helping service providers walk in survivors’ digital shoes. With the closing of the 7th annual Technology Summit, it was announced that this year’s technology summit would be held in the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. We are excited to bring Tech Summit home, and can’t wait to announce our expert speakers and conference sessions. Stay tuned to learn more!

Technology Summit 2019 logo

Coalition Against Stalkerware & Updated Materials: We started working with antivirus companies, international NGOs, and other technologists to form the Coalition Against Stalkerware. As one of the founding members of the coalition, we have worked to train technologists, provided expert-level feedback on products, and have provided our unique expertise on the intersections of technology and intimate partner violence. We have updated our materials to reflect changes around the use of stalkerware and are enthusiastic to be working with our partners on this much-needed project. Learn more about this work and check out our new materials.

Coalition Against Stalkerware

By the Numbers: We have been busy, busy, busy working on creating timely and relevant new content; providing technical assistance to the field, technology companies, and survivors; and traveling the world providing trainings on technology misuse, online dating and gaming, elders and technology, teens and tech, providing digital services, and more. Here’s a quick look at our Year In Review.

Year in Review Snapshot

Looking Ahead: We are excited to see what 2020 has to offer. We are working to build better partnerships, create more materials, provide technical assistance and training, and continue to work to increase the capacity of service providers. We are excited to launch our evidence collection app, DocuSAFE, in March 2020 and look forward to hearing feedback from the field.

We will begin testing new apps and products, providing support to other teams here at NNEDV at our unique intersection, and enhancing our own learning around technology misuse. We are looking forward to continuing this journey with each of you as we wrap up old projects and dive into new work, with the same passion for ending violence and all that 2020 has to offer.

NNEDV Commends Uber on its U.S. Safety Report, Urges More U.S. Companies to Follow Suit

Today, NNEDV joined Uber announcing its December 5 release of their U.S. Safety Report. The Report — the first of its kind — includes data about sexual assaults related to Uber rides in 2017 and 2018. Sexual assault is vastly underreported, and this is a groundbreaking step in raising awareness and encouraging survivors to share their stories. The Report also includes information about steps Uber has taken to support survivors and prevent violence before it ever occurs.

“Uber has been a longtime partner in standing against sexual assault – not just through accountability and transparency, but also by supporting survivors, eliminating barriers to reporting, and taking steps to prevent violence and harassment,” said Cindy Southworth, NNEDV Interim Chief Executive Officer and member of Uber’s Safety Advisory Board. “We call on other companies to follow Uber’s lead by partnering with anti-violence organizations to release similar.”

Sexual violence is a pervasive crime that occurs everywhere from the home to public spaces and during our movement in between, including in cars, buses, planes, trains and wherever we walk. Rideshares are no exception, and Uber’s Safety Report, for the first time, documents the experiences of both riders and drivers.  

NNEDV urges all companies, whether they be engaged in transportation or other sectors of the economy, to both collect and share similar data on the prevalence of domestic and sexual violence and work with the community to take steps to prevent it and raise awareness. 

The movement to address and end sexual and domestic violence will only succeed through a multi-level approach. This includes industry leaders like Uber partnering with organizations like NNEDV to make significant strides in changing in cultural norms.

Since 2014, NNEDV has worked with Uber on their efforts to improve their response to sexual assault and domestic violence, including its Driving Change initiative and its Safety Advisory. In 2015, NNEDV teamed up with Uber to offer safety and privacy tips for riders on the Uber app. Many survivors of domestic violence use Uber, both as drivers and as riders, and NNEDV deeply appreciates Uber’s commitment to openly addressing sexual assault and to creating innovative ways to improve safety.

More information is available at https://www.uber.com/us/en/safety/womens-safety/.

Making Strides to Stop Stalkerware

Exciting news… In the past couple of months, there has been some significant movement in the work against stalkerware. The term stalkerware, AKA spyware, refers to apps, software, or devices that allow someone to monitor or record the activity of another person’s phone or computer without their consent or knowledge. For many years, the term spyware has been used to describe the type of monitoring and surveillance these types of apps and software have prided themselves on. However, as advocates and technologists have come to better understand just how these programs and apps work, we have identified that the characteristics of these types of apps and programs are stalking behaviors. In recent years, there has been a shift in the work to identify and call these types of problematic programs and apps what they really are, which is stalkerware. This technology is incredibly sneaky and is used by abusers and stalkers as a tool to monitor, surveil, intimidate, harass, and control someone. While stalkerware still remains a significant issue for survivors of abuse, tedious but necessary work has been happening to curb both the existence of these products and their misuse.

Buh bye…

Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced their first case against a developer of stalking apps. Their investigation of and settlement with Retina-X Studios, LLC has ended with the company’s three stalking apps - MobileSpy, PhoneSheriff, and TeenShield – taken off the market and the company prohibited from selling apps that monitor devices unless they take steps to ensure they will only be used for legitimate purposes. These include not requiring jailbreaking or rooting of the device to function, acquiring written verification from the purchaser that the app will only be used for legal purposes, ensuring a visible icon remains on the device that can provide the user with information, and deleting all personal information previously collected by the apps. Prior to the settlement, all three of Retina-X’s apps required the purchaser to circumvent the phone’s security features by either jailbreaking or rooting the phone and then allowed the person to monitor the phone remotely without any notice to the owner of the device.

When the apps were taken off the market, they had more than 15,000 subscriptions. Anyone doing this work knows that a large number of those subscriptions were likely used for abusive purposes and likely brought much harm in the time they were used. We are grateful to the FTC for their leadership on this and for bringing us in during the process prior to the announcement. We worked closely with the FTC to create graphics to accompany their announcement and provided feedback on the notification language they were crafting.

Clues that stalkerware may be on device

Building Partnerships

Today, the announcement was made about the creation of the Coalition Against Stalkerware and the new resource, StopStalkerware.org. We are a member of this Coalition, which is made up of technology companies and advocacy organizations. Leading up to this, we have been working with several anti-spyware companies to learn more about stalkerware, the options to prevent and detect it, and ensure that the experiences of survivors are understood. The Coalition will work together to create industry-wide standards for defining and detecting stalkerware, strategies to increase education and awareness about the issue for survivors, and potential solutions to eliminate spyware completely. Many of the companies involved have been conducting research and increasing education for prevention for many years, and we are enthusiastic to be able to share and collaborate on this effort.

 We also recently participated in Virus Bulletin’s Annual Conference alongside Kaspersky. This event is focused on international threat intelligence and it was a meaningful opportunity to bring the voices of advocates and survivors into that space. We learned a great deal about this work and provided training around the misuse of stalkerware apps and their implications for survivors of abuse.

New Resources

Because of the swift momentum of these growing partnerships and the urge to ensure helpful information is available to survivors, we have worked diligently to update our own materials around spyware/stalkerware within the Survivor Technology and Privacy Toolkit. 

We are excited to be a part of the changing landscape in both government and technology spaces in terms of holding spyware/stalkerware companies and abusers accountable. This work will require many partners and approaches to ensure that the products being created do not intentionally harm survivors and will be a critical piece to the broader goal of addressing abuse.