Safety as a Grand Challenge in Pervasive Computing: Using Feminist Epistemologies to Shift the Paradigm From Security to Safety

Designers and developers of pervasive technologies have started to address privacy concerns. However, little work has been done to address the numerous safety concerns for specific social and population groups that fall outside conventional threat modeling based on network-based adversaries. If researchers, engineers, and designers are conscious about concerns for privacy, they must also be considerate of the safety of users of their systems. By using feminist and justice-orientated lenses to technology creation and testing, we present the concept of safety as a challenge and a hopeful aspiration for pervasive computing. We present a feminist vision for the future of pervasive technologies that engages with issues of technology-mediated harms to mitigate or aim to eradicate them entirely. By examining two concrete concepts of trust and abusability that will assist on this aspirational journey, we highlight ways to build safer technologies that are grounded in justice and safety for all.