Conference & Journal Paper
Understanding Digital-Safety Experiences of Youth in the U.S.
Diana Freed, Natalie N. Bazarova, Sunny Consolvo, Eunice Han, Patrick Gage Kelley, Kurt Thomas, Dan Cosley
Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), Hamburg, Germany, 2023
April 2023
Abstract
The seamless integration of technology into the lives of youth has raised concerns about their digital safety. While prior work has explored youth experiences with physical, sexual, and emotional threats—such as bullying and trafficking—there is a need for a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the myriad of threats that youth experience. By synthesizing the perspectives of 36 youth and 65 adult participants from the U.S., we provide an overview of today's complex digital-safety landscape. We describe attacks youth experienced, how these moved across platforms and into the physical world, and the resulting harms. We also describe protective practices the youth and the adults who support them took to prevent, mitigate, and recover from attacks, and key barriers to doing this effectively. Our findings provide a broad perspective to help improve digital safety for youth and to set directions for future work.
- digital safety
- youth
- teens
- security
- privacy
- abuse
- at-risk users
- adolescent online safety
Cite this paper
@inproceedings{freed2023understanding,
title = {Understanding Digital-Safety Experiences of Youth in the U.S.},
author = {Freed, Diana and Bazarova, Natalie N. and Consolvo, Sunny and Han, Eunice and Kelley, Patrick Gage and Thomas, Kurt and Cosley, Dan},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1145/3544548.3581128},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581128},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), Hamburg, Germany, 2023},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}