Sunny Consolvo
Sunny is a researcher at Google where she spends most of her time focusing on digital-safety topics.
Authored Publications
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Supporting the Digital Safety of At-Risk Users: Lessons Learned from 9+ Years of Research and Training
Tara Matthews
Patrick Gage Kelley
Lea Kissner
Andreas Kramm
Andrew Oplinger
Andy Schou
Stephan Somogyi
Dalila Szostak
Jill Woelfer
Lawrence You
Izzie Zahorian
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 32(3) (2025), pp. 1-39
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Creating information technologies intended for broad use that allow everyone to participate safely online—which we refer to as inclusive digital safety—requires understanding and addressing the digital-safety needs of a diverse range of users who face elevated risk of technology-facilitated attacks or disproportionate harm from such attacks—i.e., at-risk users. This article draws from more than 9 years of our work at Google to understand and support the digital safety of at-risk users—including survivors of intimate partner abuse, people involved with political campaigns, content creators, youth, and more—in technology intended for broad use. Among our learnings is that designing for inclusive digital safety across widely varied user needs and dynamic contexts is a wicked problem with no “correct” solution. Given this, we describe frameworks and design principles we have developed to help make at-risk research findings practically applicable to technologies intended for broad use and lessons we have learned about communicating them to practitioners.
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Beyond Digital Literacy: Building Youth Digital Resilience Through Existing “Information Sensibility” Practices
Mia Hassoun
Ian Beacock
Todd Carmody
Patrick Gage Kelley
Beth Goldberg
Devika Kumar
Laura Murray
Rebekah Park
Behzad Sarmadi
Social Sciences Journal, 14(4) (2025)
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Youth media consumption and disordered eating practices have historically been subjects of moral panics, often resulting in protective, deficit-based interventions like content removal. We argue for interventions which instead equip youth to evaluate and manage risks in their online environments, building upon their existing “information sensibility” practices. Drawing upon ethnographic research and intervention testing with 77 participants in the US and India, we analyze how youth (aged 13–26), including those with diverse political perspectives and those recovering from disordered eating (DE), engage with online news and health information. Participants generally algorithmically encountered (rather than searched for) information online, and their engagement was shaped more by social motivations—like belonging—than truth seeking. Participants interpreted online information collaboratively, relying on social cues and peer validation within their online communities. They demonstrated preference for personal testimonies and relatable sources, particularly those with similar social identities. We propose resilience-building interventions that build upon these youth online information practices by: (1) leveraging peer networks, promoting critical information engagement through collaborative learning and peer-to-peer support within online communities; (2) developing social media sensibility, equipping youth to critically evaluate information sources in situ; (3) providing pathways offline, connecting youth to desired in-person communities; and (4) encouraging probabilistic thinking.
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PROTECT: A Framework to Foster Digital Resilience for Youth Navigating Technology-Facilitated Abuse
Diana Freed
Natalie Bazarova
Dan Cosley
Patrick Gage Kelley
Social Sciences Journal, 14(6) (2025)
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Youth are increasingly exposed to a broad range of technology-facilitated abuse that challenges their safety and well-being. Building on previous work that examined youth help-seeking behaviors, coping strategies, threats they encounter, and the social support systems around them, we articulate a framework— called PROTECT—Problem recognition, Reaching out, Organizing support, Training, Engaging experts, Continuous support, and Tackling safety measures—which integrates existing models of support, help-seeking, and digital skills to offer a high-level, structured approach to adults who serve as a support system to youth navigate technology-facilitated abuse. The framework unpacks social and contextual dynamics that influence help-seeking behaviors, providing a foundation for educators, advocates, health professionals, developers and other adult stakeholders to design and develop trauma-informed, timely interventions to promote resilience.
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Understanding Help-Seeking and Help-Giving on Social Media for Image-Based Sexual Abuse
Tara Matthews
Miranda Wei
Patrick Gage Kelley
Sarah Meiklejohn
(2024)
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Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), like other forms of technology-facilitated abuse, is a growing threat to peoples' digital safety. Attacks include unwanted solicitations for sexually explicit images, extorting people under threat of leaking their images, or purposefully leaking images to enact revenge or exert control. In this paper, we explore how people experiencing IBSA seek and receive help from social media. Specifically, we identify over 100,000 Reddit posts that engage relationship and advice communities for help related to IBSA. We draw on a stratified sample of these posts to qualitatively examine how various types of IBSA unfold, the support needs of victim-survivors experiencing IBSA, and how communities help victim-survivors navigate their abuse through technical, emotional, and relationship advice. In the process, we highlight how gender, relationship dynamics, and the threat landscape influence the design space of sociotechnical solutions. We also highlight gaps that remain to connecting victim-survivors with important care---regardless of whom they turn to for help.
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"Millions of people are watching you": Understanding the digital safety needs of creators
Patrawat Samermit
Patrick Gage Kelley
Tara Matthews
Vanessia Wu
(2023)
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Online content creators---who create and share their content on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube---are uniquely at-risk of increased digital-safety threats due to their public prominence, the diverse social norms of wide-ranging audiences, and their access to audience members as a valuable resource. We interviewed 23 creators to understand their digital-safety experiences. This includes the security, privacy, and abuse threats they have experienced across multiple platforms and how the threats have changed over time. We also examined the protective practices they have employed to stay safer, including tensions in how they adopt the practices. We found that creators have diverse threat models that take into consideration their emotional, physical, relational, and financial safety. Most adopted protections---including distancing from technology, moderating their communities, and seeking external or social support---only after experiencing a serious safety incident. Lessons from their experiences help us better prepare and protect creators and ensure a diversity of voices are present online.
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Online hate and harassment poses a threat to the digital safety of people globally. In light of this risk, there is a need to equip as many people as possible with advice to stay safer online. We interviewed 24 experts to understand what threats and advice internet users should prioritize to prevent or mitigate harm. As part of this, we asked experts to evaluate 45 pieces of existing hate-and-harassment-specific digital-safety advice to understand why they felt advice was viable or not. We find that experts frequently had competing perspectives for which threats and advice they would prioritize. We synthesize sources of disagreement, while also highlighting the primary threats and advice where experts concurred. Our results inform immediate efforts to protect users from online hate and harassment, as well as more expansive socio-technical efforts to establish enduring safety.
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Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information
Amelia Hassoun
Ian Beacock
Beth Goldberg
Patrick Gage Kelley
Daniel M. Russell
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2023)
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Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is complicated. Literacy-based paradigms are both widely used to help and widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they assess information online. We found that they tended to encounter—rather than search for—information, and that those encounters were shaped more by social motivations than by truth-seeking queries. For them, information processing is fundamentally a social practice. Gen Zers interpreted online information together, as aspirational members of social groups. Our participants sought information sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of the value of information encountered online. We outline key challenges they faced and practices they used to make sense of information. Our findings suggest that like their information sensibility practices, solutions and strategies to address misinformation should be embedded in social contexts online.
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Understanding Digital-Safety Experiences of Youth in the U.S.
Diana Freed
Natalie N. Bazarova
Eunice Han
Patrick Gage Kelley
Dan Cosley
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2023)
Preview abstract
The seamless integration of technology into the lives of youth has raised concerns about their digital safety. While prior work has explored youth experiences with physical, sexual, and emotional threats—such as bullying and trafficking—a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the myriad threats that youth experience is needed. By synthesizing the perspectives of 36 youth and 65 adult participants from the U.S., we provide an overview of today’s complex digital-safety landscape. We describe attacks youth experienced, how these moved across platforms and into the physical world, and the resulting harms. We also describe protective practices the youth and the adults who support them took to prevent, mitigate, and recover from attacks, and key barriers to doing this effectively. Our findings provide a broad perspective to help improve digital safety for youth and set directions for future work.
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“I just wanted to triple check ... they were all vaccinated” — Supporting Risk Negotiation in the Context of COVID-19
Jennifer Brown
Jennifer C. Mankoff
Margaret E. Morris
Paula S. Nurius
Savanna Yee
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (2022)
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, risk negotiation became an important precursor to in-person contact. For young adults, social planning generally occurs through computer-mediated communication. Given the importance of social connectedness for mental health and academic engagement, we sought to understand how young adults plan in-person meetups over computer-mediated communication in the context of the pandemic. We present a qualitative study that explores young adults’ risk negotiation during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of conflicting public health guidance. Inspired by cultural probe studies, we invited participants to express their preferred precautions for one week as they planned in-person meetups. We interviewed and surveyed participants about their experiences. Through qualitative analysis, we identify strategies for risk negotiation, social complexities that impede risk negotiation, and emotional consequences of risk negotiation. Our findings have implications for AI-mediated support for risk negotiation and assertive communication more generally. We explore tensions between risks and potential benefits of such systems.
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SoK: A Framework for Unifying At-Risk User Research
Noel Warford
Tara Matthews
Kaitlyn Yang
Omer Akgul
Patrick Gage Kelley
Nathan Malkin
Michelle L. Mazurek
(2022)
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At-risk users are people who experience risk factors that augment or amplify their chances of being digitally attacked and/or suffering disproportionate harms. In this systematization work, we present a framework for reasoning about at-risk users based on a wide-ranging meta-analysis of 95 papers. Across the varied populations that we examined (e.g., children, activists, people with disabilities), we identified 10 unifying contextual risk factors—such as marginalization and access to a sensitive resource—that augment or amplify digital-safety risks and their resulting harms. We also identified technical and non-technical practices that at-risk users adopt to attempt to protect themselves from digital-safety risks. We use this framework to discuss barriers that limit at-risk users’ ability or willingness to take protective actions. We believe that researchers and technology creators can use our framework to identify and shape research investments to benefit at-risk users, and to guide technology design to better support at-risk users.
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