Electronic footprints in the sand: Technologies for assisting domestic violence survivors

With the rapid growth and spread of Internet-based social support systems, the impact that these systems can make to society – be it good or bad – has become more significant and can make a real difference to people’s lives. As such, various aspects of these systems need to be carefully investigated and analysed, including their security/privacy issues. In this paper, we present our work in designing and implementing various technological features that can be used to assist domestic violence survivors in obtaining help without leaving traces which might lead to further violence from their abuser. This case study serves as the core of our paper, in which we outline our approach, various design considerations – including difficulties in keeping browsing history private, our currently implemented solutions (single use URL, targeted history sanititation agent, and secret graphical gateway), as well as novel ideas for future work (including location-based service advertising and deployment in the wild).