The Web of Abuse: A Comprehensive Analysis of Online Resource in the Context of Technology-Enabled Intimate Partner Surveillance

Previous research has shown that abusers in an intimate relationship can find plenty of technical advice, tools, and how-to guides online for covertly conducting intimate partner surveillance (IPS). However, it is unclear what resources survivors seeking to defend themselves against IPS can use. To address this gap, we first conducted a survey-based study with 63 survivors recruited via Prolific to understand what resources survivors rely on. We showed that 45% utilized online resources for assistance, with 67% of them relying on search engines. We then conducted a systematic survey of the results obtained via Google search engine to identify resources available for survivors. We found that the resources survivors can find online contain poor, inaccurate, and unactionable advice. They are hard to understand and do not help mitigate IPS. To investigate whether the lack of useful resources is solely experienced by survivors, we also crawled resources that abusers will find online. We found that abusers can easily find resources recommending spyware apps and hidden devices and often explicitly promoting IPS. We also compared the understandability and actionability of the resources using an adopted Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) score. We concluded that resources available to abusers are significantly more understandable and actionable than those available to survivors.