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As technology becomes more ingrained in daily life, domestic abusers and perpetrators of human trafficking are using it in insidious new ways that can target their victims even from a distance. That’s why Nicola Dell, a computer and information scientist at Cornell Tech, studies technology-facilitated abuse and how to stop it. Her pioneering work helps survivors of intimate partner violence and human trafficking so they can regain their personal and digital safety.
Dell’s research focuses on predicting and warding off the potential actions of attackers who can bypass many types of security precautions simply through their intimate knowledge of their targets. For instance, instead of stalking someone by following them in a car or on foot, attackers can now surreptitiously trail their target’s every move using the location tracking technologies on smartphones or other digital devices.
While it’s common for perpetrators to track, stalk, harass or even impersonate the people they intend to harm, this type of technology abuse is understudied by computer scientists. The novel challenges make it “a very interesting [research] space from a human–computer interaction perspective,” Dell says.