ABSTRACT
In 2020, there were widespread Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the U.S. Because many attendees were novice protesters, organizations distributed guides for staying safe at a protest, often including security and privacy advice. To understand what advice novice protesters are given, we collected 41 safety guides distributed during BLM protests in spring 2020. We identified 13 classes of digital security and privacy advice in these guides. To understand whether this advice influences protesters, we surveyed 167 BLM protesters. Respondents reported an array of security and privacy concerns, and their concerns were magnified when considering fellow protesters. While most respondents reported being aware of, and following, certain advice (e.g., choosing a strong phone passcode), many were unaware of key advice like using end-to-end encrypted messengers and disabling biometric phone unlocking. Our results can guide future advice and technologies to help novice protesters protect their security and privacy.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
- Monica Anderson, Skye Toor, Lee Rainie, and Aaron Smith. 2018. An analysis of #BlackLivesMatter and other Twitter hashtags related to political or social issues. Pew Research Center (2018).Google Scholar
- Ahmer Arif, Leo Graiden Stewart, and Kate Starbird. 2018. Acting the part: Examining information operations within #BlackLivesMatter discourse. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2 (2018).Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ingolf Becker, Simon Parkin, and M. Angela Sasse. 2017. Finding security champions in blends of organisational culture. In Proc. USEC.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Odette Beris, Adam Beautement, and M. Angela Sasse. 2015. Employee rule breakers, excuse makers and security champions: Mapping the risk perceptions and emotions that drive security behaviors. In Proc. NSPW.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Black Lives Matter. 2020. About. https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/Google Scholar
- Black Lives Matter. 2020. Homepage. https://blacklivesmatter.com/Google Scholar
- Black Lives Matter Belfast. 2020. Safety guide. Twitter image. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZ1Onp7XkAACfFN.png.Google Scholar
- Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County. 2020. Safety while protesting: Protesting & supporting protests safely. Posted on Seattle Central College’s Library. https://libguides.seattlecentral.edu/Staying_Safer_While_Rising_Up.Google Scholar
- Maia J. Boyd, Jamar L. Sullivan Jr., Marshini Chetty, and Blase Ur. 2021. Supplementary Materials for Understanding the Security and Privacy Advice Given to Black Lives Matter Protesters. https://www.blaseur.com/papers/chi21-blm-appendix.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel. 2020. Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in U.S. history. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.htmlGoogle Scholar
- Karoline Busse, Julia Schäfer, and Matthew Smith. 2019. Replication: No one can hack my mind. Revisiting a study on expert and non-expert security practices and advice. In Proc. SOUPS.Google Scholar
- Frank Cain. 1983. The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia. Angus & Robertson Sydney.Google Scholar
- Victoria Carty and Francisco G. Reynoso Barron. 2019. Social movements and new technology: The dynamics of cyber activism in the digital age. In The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation. Springer, 373–397.Google Scholar
- Garrett Chase. 2017. The Early History of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Implications Thereof. Nevada Law Journal 18(2017), 1091.Google Scholar
- Ivan Cherapau, Ildar Muslukhov, Nalin Asanka, and Konstantin Beznosov. 2015. On the impact of Touch ID on iPhone passcodes. In Proc. SOUPS.Google Scholar
- Ward Churchill. 2001. To disrupt, discredit and destroy. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (2001), 93.Google Scholar
- Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. 1990. The COINTELPRO papers. Boston: South End (1990).Google Scholar
- Sunny Consolvo, Jaeyeon Jung, Ben Greenstein, Pauline Powledge, Gabriel Maganis, and Daniel Avrahami. 2010. The Wi-Fi Privacy Ticker: Improving awareness & control of personal information exposure on Wi-Fi. In Proc. UbiComp.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joseph Cox. 2017. Matt Mitchell is arming underserved communities with anti-surveillance tools. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ezaane/matt-mitchell-is-arming-underserved-communities-with-anti-surveillance-toolsGoogle Scholar
- David Cunningham and John A. Noakes. 2008. What if she’s from the FBI? The effects of covert forms of social control on social movements. In Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond (Sociology of Crime Law and Deviance). Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 175–197.Google Scholar
- Duy Dang-Pham, Siddhi Pittayachawan, and Vince Bruno. 2017. Why employees share information security advice? Exploring the contributing factors and structural patterns of security advice sharing in the workplace. Computers in Human Behavior 67 (2017), 196–206.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sauvik Das, Laura A. Dabbish, and Jason I. Hong. 2019. A typology of perceived triggers for end-user security and privacy behaviors. In Proc. SOUPS.Google Scholar
- Susie Day and Laura Whitehorn. 2001. Human rights in the United States: The unfinished story of political prisoners and COINTELPRO. New Political Science 23, 2 (2001), 285–297.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Munmun De Choudhury, Shagun Jhaver, Benjamin Sugar, and Ingmar Weber. 2016. Social media participation in an activist movement for racial equality. In Proc. ICWSM.Google Scholar
- Lina Dencik and Jonathan Cable. 2017. The advent of surveillance realism: Public opinion and activist responses to the Snowden leaks. International Journal of Communication 11 (2017), 763–781.Google Scholar
- Mallika Dutt and Nadia Rasul. 2014. Raising digital consciousness: An analysis of the opportunities and risks facing human rights activists in a digital age. Sur - International Journal on Human Rights 20 (2014), 427.Google Scholar
- Ugo Etudo, Victoria Y. Yoon, and Niam Yaraghi. 2019. From Facebook to the streets: Russian troll ads and Black Lives Matter protests. In Proc. HICSS.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael Fagan and Mohammad Maifi Hasan Khan. 2016. Why do they do what they do?: A study of what motivates users to (not) follow computer security advice. In Proc. SOUPS.Google Scholar
- Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark. 2016. Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice. https://cmsimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Trevor Gabriel and Steven Furnell. 2011. Selecting security champions. Computer Fraud & Security 2011, 8 (2011), 8–12.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Oscar H. Gandy. 2007. Data mining and surveillance in the post 9/11 environment. The Surveillance Studies Reader(2007), 147–157.Google Scholar
- Max Gedig. 2018. “Woke up with death every morning.” Surveillance experiences of Black Panther Party activists. In Surveillance, Race, Culture. Springer, 267–281.Google Scholar
- Gunnar Harboe and Elaine M. Huang. 2015. Real-world affinity diagramming practices: Bridging the paper-digital gap. In Proc. CHI.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cormac Herley. 2009. So long, and no thanks for the externalities: The rational rejection of security advice by users. In Proc. NSPW.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alberto Hermida and Víctor Hernández-Santaolalla. 2018. Twitter and video activism as tools for counter-surveillance: The case of social protests in Spain. Information, Communication & Society 21, 3 (2018), 416–433.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kris Holt. 2020. 11 Ways To Protect Your Privacy While Protesting. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2020/06/07/privacy-black-lives-matter-protest-george-floyd/#70d382ce1801.Google Scholar
- Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer. 1997. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Elsevier.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jelani Ince, Fabio Rojas, and Clayton Davis. 2017. The social media response to Black Lives Matter: How Twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (2017), 1814–1830.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Iulia Ion, Rob Reeder, and Sunny Consolvo. 2015. “... no one can hack my mind”: Comparing expert and non-expert security practices. In Proc. SOUPS.Google Scholar
- Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. 2020. # HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Charles E. Jones. 1988. The political repression of the Black Panther Party 1966-1971: The case of the Oakland Bay Area. Journal of Black Studies 18, 4 (1988), 415–434.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Esther Kim. 2020. Protesting tips for being safe and strong + #blacklivesmatter. Instagram post. https://www.instagram.com/p/CA6XErjhp2c/.Google Scholar
- Ken Klippenstein. 2019. FBI strategy guide FY2018-20 and threat guidance for racial extremists. https://www.scribd.com/document/421166393/FBI-Strategy-Guide-FY2018-20-and-Threat-Guidance-for-Racial-ExtremistsGoogle Scholar
- Kirk Kristofferson, Katherine White, and John Peloza. 2014. The nature of slacktivism: How the social observability of an initial act of token support affects subsequent prosocial action. Journal of Consumer Research 40, 6 (2014), 1149–1166.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh. 2013. Does slacktivism hurt activism? The effects of moral balancing and consistency in online activism. In Proc. CHI.Google Scholar
- David Lyon. 2006. Airport screening, surveillance, and social sorting: Canadian responses to 9/11 in context. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 48, 3 (2006), 397–411.Google ScholarCross Ref
- David Lyon. 2007. Surveillance, security and social sorting: Emerging research priorities. International Criminal Justice Review 17, 3 (2007), 161–170.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gary Marx. 1974. Thoughts on a neglected category of social movement participant: The agent provocateur and the informant. Amer. J. Sociology 80(1974).Google Scholar
- Alexandra Mateescu, Douglas Brunton, Alex Rosenblat, Desmond Patton, Zachary Gold, and danah boyd. 2015. Social media surveillance and law enforcement. Data & Civil Rights 27(2015), 2015–2027.Google Scholar
- Dennis McCafferty. 2011. Activism vs. slacktivism. Commun. ACM 54, 12 (2011), 17–19.Google ScholarDigital Library
- John G McNutt. 2018. Technology, Activism, and Social Justice in a Digital Age. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- Torin Monahan. 2006. Counter-surveillance as political intervention?Social Semiotics 16, 4 (2006), 515–534.Google Scholar
- Marcia Mundt, Karen Ross, and Charla M. Burnett. 2018. Scaling social movements through social media: The case of Black Lives Matter. Social Media + Society 4, 4 (2018).Google Scholar
- Deborah Netburn. 2012. YouTube’s new face-blurring tool designed to protect activists. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-jul-18-la-fi-tn-youtube-face-blurring-20120718-story.htmlGoogle Scholar
- Huey P. Newton. 1980. War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America. Vol. 1980. University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
- James Nicholson, Lynne Coventry, and Pamela Briggs. 2019. “If it’s important it will be a headline” Cybersecurity information seeking in older adults. In Proc. CHI.Google Scholar
- Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, Angela D.R. Smith, Alexandra To, and Kentaro Toyama. 2020. Critical race theory for HCI. In Proc. CHI.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eyal Peer, Laura Brandimarte, Sonam Somat, and Alessandro Acquisti. 2017. Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research. In Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.Google Scholar
- Hao Peng, Ceren Budak, and Daniel M. Romero. 2019. Event-driven analysis of crowd dynamics in the Black Lives Matter online social movement. In Proc. WWW.Google ScholarDigital Library
- James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, and Richmond Wong. 2018. Differential vulnerabilities and a diversity of tactics: What toolkits teach us about cybersecurity. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2 (Nov. 2018).Google ScholarDigital Library
- Prolific. 2020. Quickly find research participants you can trust. https://www.prolific.co/Google Scholar
- Emilee Rader, Rick Wash, and Brandon Brooks. 2012. Stories as informal lessons about security. In Proc. SOUPS.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elissa M. Redmiles, Sean Kross, and Michelle L. Mazurek. 2016. How I learned to be secure: A census-representative survey of security advice sources and behavior. In Proc. CCS.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elissa M. Redmiles, Sean Kross, and Michelle L. Mazurek. 2019. How Well Do My Results Generalize? Comparing Security and Privacy Survey Results from MTurk, Web, and Telephone Samples. In Proc. IEEE S&P.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Elissa M. Redmiles, Amelia R. Malone, and Michelle L. Mazurek. 2016. I think they’re trying to tell me something: Advice sources and selection for digital security. In Proc. IEEE S&P.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Elissa M. Redmiles, Miraida Morales, Lisa Maszkiewicz, Rock Stevens, Everest Liu, Dhruv Kuchhal, and Michelle L. Mazurek. 2018. First steps toward measuring the readability of security advice. In Proc. ConPro.Google Scholar
- Elissa M. Redmiles, Noel Warford, Amritha Jayanti, Aravind Koneru, Sean Kross, Miraida Morales, Rock Stevens, and Michelle L. Mazurek. 2020. A comprehensive quality evaluation of security and privacy advice on the web. In Proc. USENIX Security.Google Scholar
- Robert W. Reeder, Iulia Ion, and Sunny Consolvo. 2017. 152 simple steps to stay safe online: Security advice for non-tech-savvy users. IEEE Security & Privacy 15, 5 (2017), 55–64.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katelyn Ringrose and Divya Ramjee. 2020. Watch where you walk: Law enforcement surveillance and protester privacy. California Law Review 11, 349 (2020).Google Scholar
- Ellen Schrecker. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
- Steve Sheng, Bryant Magnien, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Jason Hong, and Elizabeth Nunge. 2007. Anti-phishing Phil: The design and evaluation of a game that teaches people not to fall for phish. In Proc. SOUPS.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel J. Solove. 2007. I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy. San Diego L. Rev. 44(2007), 745.Google Scholar
- Alice Speri. 2015. 1 2014 8:14 Silent vigil alert #NMOS14. The Intercept. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2178934/1-2014-8-14-silent-vigil-alert-nmos14.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Katta Spiel, Oliver L. Haimson, and Danielle Lottridge. 2019. How to do better with gender on surveys: A guide for HCI researchers. Interactions 26, 4 (2019), 62–65.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kate Starbird. 2019. Disinformation’s spread: Bots, trolls and all of us. Nature 571, 7766 (2019), 449–450.Google Scholar
- Leo Graiden Stewart, Ahmer Arif, A. Conrad Nied, Emma S. Spiro, and Kate Starbird. 2017. Drawing the lines of contention: Networked frame contests within# BlackLivesMatter discourse. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact 1 (2017).Google ScholarDigital Library
- Leo Graiden Stewart, Ahmer Arif, and Kate Starbird. 2018. Examining trolls and polarization with a retweet network. In Proc. MIS2.Google Scholar
- Reem Talhouk, Kellie Morrissey, Sarah Fox, Nadia Pantidi, Emma Simpson, Lydia Emma Michie, and Madeline Balaam. 2018. Human computer interaction & health activism. In Proc. CHI EA.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alvin B. Tillery. 2019. What kind of movement is Black Lives Matter? The view from Twitter. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 4, 2 (2019), 297–323.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Twitter. 2020. Protesting safely. Twitter image. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZZ0-koUEAAazF3.jpg.Google Scholar
- Marlon Twyman, Brian C. Keegan, and Aaron Shaw. 2017. Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collective memory and collaboration around online social movements. In Proc. CSCW.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Julie Uldam. 2016. Corporate management of visibility and the fantasy of the post-political: Social media and surveillance. New Media & Society 18, 2 (2016), 201–219.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Julie Uldam. 2018. Social media visibility: challenges to activism. Media, Culture & Society 40, 1 (2018), 41–58.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Peter Ullrich and Philipp Knopp. 2018. Protesters’ reactions to video surveillance of demonstrations: Counter-moves, security cultures, and the spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance. Surveillance & Society(2018).Google Scholar
- Elham Vaziripour, Justin Wu, Mark O’Neill, Jordan Whitehead, Scott Heidbrink, Kent Seamons, and Daniel Zappala. 2017. Is that you, Alice? A usability study of the authentication ceremony of secure messaging applications. In Proc. SOUPS.Google Scholar
- Kevin Walby and Jeffrey Monaghan. 2011. Private eyes and public order: Policing and surveillance in the suppression of animal rights activists in Canada. Social Movement Studies 10, 1 (2011), 21–37.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Rick Wash. 2010. Folk models of home computer security. In Proc. SOUPS.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rick Wash and Molly M. Cooper. 2018. Who provides phishing training? Facts, stories, and people like me. In Proc. CHI.Google Scholar
- Denise J. Wilkins, Andrew G. Livingstone, and Mark Levine. 2019. Whose tweets? The rhetorical functions of social media use in developing the Black Lives Matter movement. British Journal of Social Psychology 58, 4 (2019), 786–805.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dean Wilson and Tanya Serisier. 2010. Video activism and the ambiguities of counter-surveillance. Surveillance & Society 8, 2 (2010), 166–180.Google ScholarCross Ref
- William Lafi Youmans and Jillian C. York. 2012. Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements. Journal of Communication 62, 2 (2012), 315–329.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mihir Zaveri. 2020. ‘I need people to hear my voice’: Teens protest racism. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/us/teens-protest-black-lives-matter.htmlGoogle Scholar
- Weiyu Zhang. 2013. Redefining youth activism through digital technology in Singapore. International Communication Gazette(2013).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Understanding the Security and Privacy Advice Given to Black Lives Matter Protesters
Recommendations
Protest Privacy Recommendations: An Analysis of Digital Surveillance Circumvention Advice During Black Lives Matter Protests
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThis paper describes a qualitative study of media and advocacy publications about digital surveillance in the context of Black Lives Matter protests, including recommendations for techniques on how to circumvent such surveillance. We conducted a content ...
The Affiliative Use of Emoji and Hashtags in the Black Lives Matter Movement in Twitter
Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone ...
Systematic analysis and comparison of security advice as datasets
AbstractA long list of documents have been offered as security advice, codes of practice, and security guidelines for building and using security products, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To date, little or no systematic analysis ...
Comments