Surveillance, Privacy, and Safety in Everyday Life: Rethinking Women’s Security through Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Event Details
Speaker - Shijing He
Location - R1.03
Date and Time - Tuesday 10 February 2026 - 15:00 to 17:00
This event is sponsored by the East Asia Study Group and the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS)
Speaker
Shijing He is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at King’s College London, affiliated with the Cybersecurity Group (CYS) in the Department of Informatics. His research lies at the intersection of human-centered usable security and privacy, human–computer interaction (HCI), and UX design. Drawing on both computational and social science methods, his work examines how individuals and groups—particularly at-risk populations such as (migrant) domestic workers and women living alone—understand, negotiate, and manage security and privacy risks in everyday technologies. His research focuses in particular on multi-user smart home environments and AI-mediated contexts, with the goal of designing equitable and trustworthy systems that better support informed security and privacy decision-making.
Surveillance, Privacy, and Safety in Everyday Life: Rethinking Women’s Security through Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Young women living alone (YWLA) in China navigate a complex intersection of layered risks spanning privacy, physical security, and digital safety. These vulnerabilities are not merely byproduct of crime, but are actively co-constituted by social norms, algorithmic platform designs, and institutional gaps in legal protection.
This talk facilitates an interdisciplinary dialogue on how "safety" is conceptualized and experienced through two complementary lenses. First, a discourse analysis of the social media platform RedNote reveals how safety anxieties are shared and amplified, eventually becoming "commodified" through the promotion of specific lifestyles and products. Second, participatory threat modeling workshops demonstrate how women internalize these threats, revealing the significant cognitive and labor costs associated with their own protective practices.
By synthesizing these findings, I argue that the current technological landscape frames security as a form of consumer empowerment while effectively shifting the burden of safety from the state or corporation onto the individual woman. I conclude by proposing a shift in human-centered security research: moving away from "selling anxiety" toward the design of environments that prioritize collective structural protection over individual commercialized surveillance.