World Technology Thought Leader — Sunny Consolvo
Technology is ever evolving and becoming more ubiquitous as the world continues to grow thanks to technology thought leaders who inspire the changes that take place. One of those technology thought leaders is Sunny Consolvo, a researcher at Google who uses her technology and research abilities to instigate the progression of new tech that is relative to human problems. Her works include the development of applications that help users track their daily activities and determine the effects on their night’s rest, tracking an elderly person’s health that may live with a user, and identifying privacy concerns regarding Wi-Fi connections. Her more recent work has been focused on the studies of new security and privacy developments for users experiencing trauma from intimate partner abuse (IPA) and the equity of women in other countries. By taking into account human troubles, Consolvo was able to address certain issues by creating technology that would allow the user to fix their distresses or gain knowledge of how to fix said ordeals.
Consolvo is continuing to progress her own theories and ideas to help the human population remove themselves from unhealthy situations. As previously mentioned, Consolvo’s recent work has been focused on the study of individuals escaping intimate partner abuse and how to protect their online presence without the interference from their abusive partners. She conducted a study where she interviewed fifteen survivors of IPA to understand the process that they went through and how to digitally address their needs. Each survivor discussed their hardships and what it was like being with a physically or emotionally violent partner. By talking through the facts with each individual, Consolvo was able to create a phase sheet which analyzed the three different digital phases that the survivors went through or were currently still fighting through.
The three phases are depicted as Physical Control, Escape, and Life Apart. The first phase, Physical Control, portrays the situation where the abuser is physically controlling their devices and the survivor may not be “allowed” to access social media. Phase two, Escape, is the step that the survivor takes to leave their abuser. This can include having to hide or delete any digital plans or communications for escape in fear that the abuser may find them. Phase three is Living Apart. During this phase, the survivor has to balance the importance of staying offline in order to ensure their abuser cannot find them and pursuing a normal life with the ability to stay in contact with family, friends, and coworkers. By using these three phases as a basis for identifying the lack of digital security and privacy, Consolvo was able to bring awareness to the growing necessity of more intense digital security practices to ensure individuals that are in abusive situations are able to escape in a more timely manner which would then help to lessen the amount of trauma that these survivors go through. Consolvo combined her technology skills to her research and was able to bring awareness to an issue with the beginnings of an idea for developers to then further the idea and create an actual product.
Sunny Consolvo also completed research surrounding the privacy ethics of South Asian women. Consolvo and the other researchers conducted a study in which the researchers interviewed one hundred women from the south Asia territory. From the interviews, the researchers were able to more fully understand the cultural difference between South Asia and other countries such as America. In South Asia, it is much more important to ensure that a person’s identity is completely private. A bad comment or even someone photoshopping a woman’s face to another photo could be detrimental to the female and her family. Women in South Asia have the reputation of themselves and sometimes their whole family resting upon their shoulders which is why inappropriate use of social media whether by themselves or a random stranger can be so damaging. The research team conducted the interviews and gained the understanding of the South Asia culture around privacy and security which allowed the team to bring awareness to the necessity of ensuring gender equity in privacy and security. Determining the need for privacy rules to be more fair towards women is an extremely imperative issue that needed to be brought to attention. Consolvo provides the importance of the privacy and security changes that need to be made for other cultures and even explains that technology and applications should have settings that are more inclusive of different cultures.
Consolvo may be a leading technology thought leader; however, she also works to develop actual applications that are useful for individuals of all shapes and sizes. Some of her more important applications include an app, CareNet, which allows individuals in a network to communicate about the care and health of an elderly individual. By taking advantage of this application, the network is able to understand how the elder is fairing and understand what care is being given in order to keep their health up. Wi-Fi Privacy Ticker is another of Consolvo’s applications that was created to inform individuals of their unencrypted web traffic that may be available for others to scavenge. The goal of the app is to make people more aware of what they are displaying for everyone to see while using public Wi-Fi. Consolvo also worked on the application Shut-Eye which informs users if certain activities at certain times will keep them up at night. If a user were to drink coffee at 5PM and inform the app of it, the app would then notify the user of the impact that may have on their sleep schedule. The development of these applications was a great help to society for them to better take care of themselves and friends or family.
As a researcher, Sunny Consolvo seeks out worldly issues and completes studies around that issue. As a leader in the technology field, Sunny Consolvo relates technology problems with real world problems and uses her research skills to address these tied issues by suggesting the implication of new technological settings or applications in order to solve said issue. Consolvo has been able to highlight key issues which allows developers to find solutions that can help all users to feel mentally and physically healthy. Although research has definitely been conducted regarding the safety of survivors of intimate partner abuse and gender-equity of South Asian women, Consolvo’s perspective and addition of the technological aspects of each issue are relatively new and innovative. To be considered a thought leader in the ubiquitous computing field, it takes individuality and innovativeness. Sunny Consolvo is a perfect example of a thought leader in the ubicomp field because of her need to theorize solutions to privacy and security problems as well as health problems and keeping individuals on track with health goals both emotionally and physically through different applications. Consolvo’s current work at Google and her past work at Intel has helped to shape ubiquitous computing.
Bibliography:
Batool, A., Nemer, D., Bursztein, E., Churchill, E., Thomas, K., Sambasivan, N., … & Matthews, T. (2019). Towards gender-equitable privacy and security in South Asia.
Home. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.consolvo.org/
Matthews, T., O’Leary, K., Turner, A., Sleeper, M., Woelfer, J. P., Shelton, M., … & Consolvo, S. (2017). Security and privacy experiences and practices of survivors of intimate partner abuse. IEEE Security & Privacy, 15(5), 76–81.
