At-Risk Users

At-risk users are people who experience elevated digital security, privacy, and safety threats because of what they do, who they are, where they are, or who they are with.

By understanding the security, privacy, and digital safety needs of these users, we are able to understand how modern technology products buckle or fail for users who may be at risk of some of the most severe harms. Sunny Consolvo led this portfolio within Google, tirelessly pushing for research that would meet the needs of these groups under Google Privacy UX’s emerging harms pillar. Over the last decade we’ve done research with survivors of intimate partner abuse, journalists, activists, content creators, political campaign staff, and more.

In 2022, we published a framework for thinking about everything we, and others, have learned about the varied people who are more vulnerable to harm or for whom harms may be more severe. Instead of only looking at each at-risk community individually, our taxonomy of 10 contextual risk factors allows us to align findings across the 85 studies we systematized. We see this as an important, foundational step in organizing the community of researchers who work with at-risk populations towards solutions that can scale to many groups.

In 2026, with the support of our amazing intern Sharon Heung, we published a 5000 person survey of Americans as a first attempt at measuring prevalence: how many people believe they are at higher risk of digital harm, across the entire population, using those 10 contextual risk factors.

Overall, ~84% of respondents had high agreement with at least one risk factor (high agreement was self reported 7+ on a 1/10 scale.) On average participants self-identified with three risk factors. Half the population felt they were too resource & time-constrained to deal with digital safety attacks.

Also after a decade of doing this work, we wrote a piece summarizing that time. Here we’re sharing, not just our research efforts, but what we learned from working with product teams and our internal class: Designing For At Risk Users, which we taught to thousands of Googlers.

To help others do work with at-risk populations, we, in collaboration with researchers at Cornell Tech, the University of Maryland, and others, wrote a paper on strategies for conducting this type of work, based on these lessons learned.