"Did They F***ing Consent to That?": Safer Digital Intimacy via Proactive Protection Against Image-Based Sexual Abuse

TL;DR

This paper investigates the risks of image-based sexual abuse among content creators and proposes proactive technological protections to enhance safety in digital intimacy, based on empirical interviews with European creators.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed empirical study of creators' threats and defenses, and offers concrete recommendations for technological and platform-based safety improvements.

Findings

Many creators face threats of nonconsensual distribution.

Technological mitigations are limited and underutilized.

Proactive protections can significantly improve safety.

Abstract

As many as 8 in 10 adults share intimate content such as nude or lewd images. Sharing such content has significant benefits for relationship intimacy and body image, and can offer employment. However, stigmatizing attitudes and a lack of technological mitigations put those sharing such content at risk of sexual violence. An estimated 1 in 3 people have been subjected to image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), a spectrum of violence that includes the nonconsensual distribution or threat of distribution of consensually-created intimate content (also called NDII). In this work, we conducted a rigorous empirical interview study of 52 European creators of intimate content to examine the threats they face and how they defend against them, situated in the context of their different use cases for intimate content sharing and their choice of technologies for storing and sharing such content. Synthesizing our results with the limited body of prior work on technological prevention of NDII, we offer concrete next steps for both platforms and security & privacy researchers to work toward safer intimate content sharing through proactive protection. Content Warning: This work discusses sexual violence, specifically, the harms of image-based sexual abuse (particularly in Sections 2 and 6).