Join us for Change Seminar *today 11/5! * Also, please not the change of room: *we will be in CSE2-371* *When*: Today 11/5, 12pm-1pm *Where*: *CSE2-371* *Who: *Nithya Sambasivan *Title: *Safety, privacy, and gender equity online *Abstract* The Internet isn't gender equitable. In over two-thirds of countries worldwide, there are more male than female users online. And, in India, only 29% of Internet users were reported to be women in 2017. In this talk, I will share findings on how safety & privacy threats limit women's access and free expression online, drawn from our gender equity research in seven countries, spanning nearly 2 years. I will present novel and chilling abuse threats enabled by pervasive social media platforms, resulting in cyberstalking, impersonation and personal data leakages, and how our participants experienced and coped with the threats. I will also share how inadequate privacy on devices led participants to create privacy-preserving practices while sharing phones, such as locks, deleting traces, and avoiding specific digital activities. I will then discuss design implications towards a safer, more private Internet. These research insights have been applied to several Google products, like Google Maps and Neighourly. Check out the full report at g.co/genderequityonline, and papers on abuse <https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/acf12158ab313c1e9d80b87ede065254f64ad9a7.pdf> and privacy <https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/02bd1bcbb214c4178f7656faaa8114cd04294207.pdf> for details. *Bio* Nithya Sambasivan is a researcher at Google Research, focused on the HCI questions of AI globally. Her research has enabled Google to focus on people in the Global South and been applied to several product deployments, such as Google Station, Datally, Google Go, Google Maps, and Crisis Response. She graduated with a Ph.D. from University of California, Irvine and an MS from Georgia Tech, with a dissertation focused on technology design for low-income slum communities, urban sex workers, and microenterprises in India. She previously worked at Next Billion Users, Access & Energy and Google.org (all at Google), Microsoft Research India, IBM Research T J Watson, and Nokia Research Finland.