Understanding Help Seeking for Digital Privacy, Safety, and Security

TL;DR

This study analyzes over one billion Reddit posts to understand how users seek help for digital privacy, safety, and security, aiming to improve support resources and tools for navigating complex online threats.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale dataset of help-seeking posts, combining qualitative coding and LLM fine-tuning, to map the landscape of digital help seeking on social media.

Findings

Identifies key topics and communities involved in help seeking

Quantifies the scope and scale of help requests

Highlights challenges in supporting users with complex threats

Abstract

The complexity of navigating digital privacy, safety, and security threats often falls directly on users. This leads to users seeking help from family and peers, platforms and advice guides, dedicated communities, and even large language models (LLMs). As a precursor to improving resources across this ecosystem, our community needs to understand what help seeking looks like in the wild. To that end, we blend qualitative coding with LLM fine-tuning to sift through over one billion Reddit posts from the last four years to identify where and for what users seek digital privacy, safety, or security help. We isolate three million relevant posts with 93% precision and recall and automatically annotate each with the topics discussed (e.g., security tools, privacy configurations, scams, account compromise, content moderation, and more). We use this dataset to understand the scope and scale of help seeking, the communities that provide help, and the types of help sought. Our work informs the development of better resources for users (e.g., user guides or LLM help-giving agents) while underscoring the inherent challenges of supporting users through complex combinations of threats, platforms, mitigations, context, and emotions.