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

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).