Who's Security Are We Talking About Anyway?

Cybersecurity often focuses on the protection of digital assets, including from human-related risks. Critical technology scholars and feminist scholars studying oppression-based violence, however, emphasize that even those technologies designed to offer protection can actually cause harm, particularly to members of groups who are most at risk of negative effects due to social or political marginalization. 

Dr. Kristen Thomasen and Prof. Jane Bailey will present a chapter co-auhored with Dr. Jacquelyn Burkell upcoming in The Security of Self (University of Ottawa Press, 2025) edited by Dr. Emily Laidlaw and Dr. Florian Martin-Bariteau.

They examine how systems positioned as security tools for marketing purposes can introduce new security risks for some people, looking specifically at the example of Amazon Ring. Monitoring systems provide no active protection against violence, while enabling various forms of violence: through the traditional cybersecurity scenario of malicious hacking; through internal corporate structures that facilitate unwanted third-party access to information recorded by the system; through an abusable system that can be co-opted to surveil the person supposedly protected by the system; and through the establishment of a surveillance infrastructure that predictably creates vulnerability to systemic and epistemic violence for those who are captured in the surveillance records.

Given this, they argue for a risk assessment process that includes a focus on the potential negative consequences of 'security' technology, and that centres the perspectives of groups who are disproportionately at risk of negative impacts. They will offer recommendations for more comprehensive assessments of security in cybersecurity discourse.