We conduct research studies to better understand how people might face difficulties with technology-facilitated abuse so that we can find ways to support them. If you would like to help out with our research, please let us or your advocate know.

Healing Through Tech Agency in Indigenous Nations

We are looking to form a partnership with Indigenous nations. We would like to meet the community leaders, and we seek approval from the Tribal Council to conduct the study.

Goal: We aim to understand the challenges faced by the Indigenous survivors in seeking support. Participants will be compensated for their time and all data will be anonymized including participants’ personal information and the details of the community. We take considerable care in data collection, data analysis, and reporting the results, ensuring the utmost safety of the participants. We have obtained an exemption from UW-Madison’s Ethics Review Board and the UW Tribal Liason Office.

For more details, please visit the project page.

Understanding the needs of Rural survivors of technology-facilitated abuse

We are looking to form a partnership with DV organizations in rural counties of Wisconsin. We would like to learn from the community advocates to conduct the study.

Goal: We aim to understand the challenges faced by the survivors who live in rural communities in seeking support. Participants will be compensated for their time and all data will be anonymized including participants’ personal information and the details of the community. We take considerable care in data collection, data analysis, and reporting the results, ensuring the utmost safety of the participants. We have obtained an exemption from UW-Madison’s Ethics Review Board.

Understanding Covert Devices used in Intimate Partner Surveillance

We are actively investigating what covert devices (hidden cameras, microphones, GPS trackers) are used by abusers to surveil their partners. Moreover, we are working to develop techniques that will empower survivors of abuse to protect themselves from these devices.

Our prior work on this project involved measuring what covert devices are available from large online retailers such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. We found that a variety of devices are available, most of which were under $20, and some of which were actively advertising themselves as useful for spying on one’s partner. We went on to test a sample of these devices and founf that they are effective at enabling surveilance. We then repeated our search and testing method with commercially available spy device detectors and found that they were completely incapable of detecting the covert devices. More details can be found in the paper we published at USENIX Security 2023 (available here).

Present and Future Work: We are presently exploring new theoretical techniques to locate hidden spy devices. Once we have found a technique that is reliable and effective, we intend to involve survivors and advocates in a collaborative design process for the new detection tool. Our overall goal is to create a tool that can be used by as many people as possible, with as little reliance on specialized hardware as possible (i.e., the resulting tool should ideally not require a survivor to purchase anything). As such, including the target users in our design process is essential.

SAFE EXIT