Safety by Design Will Not Save Us: Why Financial Technologies Always Side with Economic Abuse Perpetrators

“Safety by design” has become a familiar mantra within design, policy and information security circles. We take issue with this approach to design, an ahistorical and solutionist interpretation of technology-facilitated abuse that asks practitioners to anticipate how their systems might be misused, and to adjust their design to foreclose those possibilities. We argue that the features enabling technology-facilitated abuse are deeply embedded in the foundational principles under which digital technologies are conceived, and that addressing such harms instead requires systemic change. Taking fintech-facilitated economic abuse as our case study, we demonstrate that “safety by design” is powerless against the harmful potential of digital systems, and that promoting it is not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive.