Safety, Privacy, Security, & Access: Four Pillars of Consumer and Survivor Wellbeing

Stalking Awareness Month Graphic

As we commemorate National Stalking Awareness Month and Data Privacy Day today, we recognize four pillars to ensuring both consumer and survivor well-being: Safety, Privacy, Security, and Access. These pillars are the foundation that guides our work every day in helping to safeguard technology safety for all. While all of these go hand-in-hand, we’ll look at each one below. 

 Safety: In today’s digital age, survivors have an exhausting list of considerations to protect their information and their safety. Whether protecting location, online activity, home, and work addresses, or children’s whereabouts, so much of this is critical for a survivor’s safety. Survivors have a right to technology and shouldn’t have to choose between staying safe and using a device or platform. Many people rely on the internet to shop, look for jobs, search for resources, maybe even conduct business as part of their livelihood. Strong privacy and security policies and settings, along with access to technology, help keep all of us safe.   

 Privacy: Today is Data Privacy Day, but survivors and consumers alike always have a need for privacy. Whether a person wants to make sure that their accounts are private from the prying eyes of family members or future employers, or survivors of stalking who need to know the platforms they use do not share information with others, privacy benefits everyone. Strong privacy policies, settings, and protections mean that survivors and consumers can have one more way to take back control over their digital lives.

Security: Having a secure way to communicate with trusted individuals, seek online resources or help, or have a place to store legal, health, or other personal documents is incredibly important. As consumers, we share our information when using online spaces, services, and apps and hope that it remains secure. Strong security measures help ensure that personal information does not get into the wrong hands. 

 Access: Building a platform that is intentional in centering the needs of survivors and consumers means considering the accessibility needs of those who live with disabilities, speak another language, or have culturally-specific privacy and safety needs. Built from these perspectives, technology can be used by as many survivors and consumers as possible. Accessibility barriers that keep survivors from getting assistance can be a significant safety risk. Making sure that we have accessible products, platforms, and technologies should be a core tenet of our work.

Building and using technology with all this in mind can be challenging. For survivors, it can be exhausting and terrifying. Fortunately, more and more online platforms and services are building in End-to-End (E2E) Encryption as the default functionality to protect the privacy and security of users and their data. We’re always happy to see these announcements and even more thrilled when the platform has clearly also considered safety and accessibility!

E2E Encryption can be a little hard to understand, but it’s a really important feature to ensure privacy – and if you’re a victim service provider, to protect confidentiality. Safety Net worked with the Internet Society on a new resource to help survivors and service providers understand E2E Encryption more. Whether you’re a technology start-up, a victim service provider, or a survivor – understanding and using E2E encryption can be an important step to prioritizing safety, privacy, security, and ensuring access.

These four pillars guide us in this work and allow survivors and consumers the ability to harness the power to remain online in a safe and meaningful way.

2020: When Work Shifts, Our Core Values Remain

Screenshot Safety Net year in review image

This year we all experienced unprecedented changes in how we do our work due to COVID-19. While quarantining at home or navigating essential work safely, we all had to quickly shift to adapt to the needs of survivors, learning new technologies, and understanding the risks and challenges with the pandemic. Simultaneously, we witnessed a social reckoning with the call to action to center Black and Brown lives in this country and the rights of victims and survivors.

With all that was going on, in the chaos of switching to full remote work, we worked diligently to respond to the needs of the field with timely information ranging from webinars, handouts, technical assistance, and adjusting our Tech Summit to a virtual space. As 2020 ends, with so much to mourn, we also celebrate the successes of this year, while still focusing on how to improve our training, technical assistance, and services. We could not have done this work without our generous sponsors and funders and the dedication from the field to continue to put emphasis on survivor-centered practices.

We share with you some of the highlights from 2020 and hope that as we end this year, we remember our core values and hold a refreshed sense of advocacy. We are also in awe of the sheer determination we witnessed from programs across the country to meet the needs of survivors, regardless of what challenges the year brought. We hope that all of you take a moment to look at your accomplishments too because despite how the year has been, they are there and they are important.  

1. We Trained, We Saw, We Conquered- This year we provided 75 trainings for all types of service providers. At the beginning of the year, our COVID-19 rapid response focused on Working Remotely During a Public Health Crisis, FAQ’s on Confidentiality & COVID-19, and helping programs to assess the benefits and risks of technology. This was especially important as we saw an increase in survivors using tech to communicate with services and their loved ones. We developed content on contact tracing, working with older adult survivors and survivors with disabilities who are using technology, and voter registration. In total, we have trained over 11,902 advocates, law enforcement, legal professionals, and other service providers this year. Even though most of our training was conducted from our homes, we were still able to provide training for advocates in many countries including Tribal communities, almost all 56 states and territories, and even virtually trained abroad in places like Taiwan, Italy, Afghanistan, and more.

All of the Countries, States and Territories The Safety Net Team Trained this year

2. Answering Difficult Questions: We always get a lot of requests for technical assistance (TA), but this year we received more TA than ever. We provided TA on complex technology-facilitated abuse, how to set up remote services, confidentiality and working remotely, helping survivors vote safely, technologists looking to create products, apps, software; and the list goes on. We provided close to 500 hours of technical assistance this year. Understanding the ins and outs of technology, confidentiality, and service provision can be complex and we are always willing to help programs as they work with survivors to understand these nuances.

3. Tech Summit Goes Virtual: It’s one thing to provide guidance on how to conduct a virtual event, it’s another to put it into practice. We hosted our annual Tech Summit, taking a 3-day in-person conference and made it a 5-day virtual event. We had close to 750 people register to attend and to receive recordings of the training. We worked to ensure that even though we were virtual, the sessions were engaging and informative. Though we ran into a few technical difficulties, we learned from them, and are excited to come back next year, whether virtual or in-person. Our Tips for Hosting a Virtual Event Guide has more information to help you as you plan a virtual event.

Looking Ahead

As we move into 2021, we continue to keep the needs of the field and survivors at the heart of what we do. We are looking to ensure that our content is always timely and relevant, factoring in the unique needs many communities have, and the ways that access to technology is still a barrier for many survivors.

We know that confidentiality, the digital divide, providing remote and digital services, and transformative justice in technology are all topics we want to explore more and incorporate into our training, materials, webinars, and how we do this work.

We are grateful every day for the amazing ways we get to support programs, technologists, service providers, and survivors. We know that this year has been complicated, exhausting, and has really shifted our collective thinking in how survivors reach out to services, how programs communicate, and all of the in-between.

We are hopeful as we go into the new year, knowing that we will bring our same core values to center the voices of survivors, empowering survivors in their technology use, and supporting programs as we all work to end violence for all.

Check out our infographic to learn more about how we did our work this year! Read more about NNEDV’s reflections on 2020.