Abandoned but Not Forgotten: Providing Access While Protecting Foster Youth from Online Risks Karla Badillo-Urquiola University of Central Florida Orlando, FL, U.S.A kcurquiola10@knights.ucf.edu Scott Harpin University of Colorado Aurora, CO, U.S.A Scott.Harpin@ucdenver.edu Pamela Wisniewski University of Central Florida Orlando, FL, U.S.A pamwis@ucf.edu ABSTRACT Teens in the foster care system often have histories that involve severe trauma, such as physical and sexual abuse, substance use, incarceration, and early pregnancy. While studies have investigated foster teens’ engagement with high-risk behaviors offline, there is a dearth of information regarding foster teens and their engagement in online activities that may facilitate increased risk behaviors. Moreover, the extent to which technology acts as a positive versus negative influence on foster youth is unclear. We synthesize the current literature on foster youth and online safety to illustrate: 1) the tensions between providing access to networked technologies versus keeping foster youth safe from risks, 2) the lack of empirical research or technology- based interventions to ensure the online safety of foster youth, and 3) the importance of pursuing future research to design solutions that can alleviate some of these tensions. Our goal is to inform researchers, designers, and educators on the importance of keeping in mind the needs of particularly vulnerable populations, such as teens within the foster care system, when designing interactive systems. Author Keywords Adolescent Online Safety; Teens; Foster Care; Technology; Participatory Design. ACM Classification Keywords K.4.1 Computers and Society: Public Policy Issues. INTRODUCTION On a given day, over 400,000 youth reside in the foster care system within the United States, and approximately 30% of these youth are aged 13 to 20 [54]. Many of these youth experience a multitude of traumatic events in their lives. Nearly 80% of foster youth have had at least one adverse experience related to parental divorce, death, domestic violence, or family drug addiction with almost half (48.3%) experiencing four or more of these traumatic events before they reach adulthood [7]. Research has consistently confirmed that youth in foster care are susceptible to higher levels of risk than those who are not in foster care and have more detrimental outcomes due to their risk experiences [39,40]. However, very little research has examined the influence of networked technologies (e.g., social media, mobile smart devices) on foster youths’ risk behaviors, adverse experiences, or negative outcomes [3,22]. In terms of adolescents in general, we know that technology currently consumes a large portion of teens’ lives. According to Pew Research, more than half of the teens in the United States report going online multiple times a day, if not constantly being connected [1]. The prevalence of technology use has been shown to expose teens to a number of online risks. For instance, one in four teens will unintentionally be exposed to sexually explicit materials online [37]. Understanding these potential risks has motivated researchers in the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference and the broader HCI community to study effective methods for keeping teens safe from online risks [2,4,21,29,48]. Some suggestions include building trust through discourse [29], emphasizing teen resilience [48], and moving toward design solutions that promote active parental mediation [34] and teen-self regulation, as opposed to solutions that are privacy invasive and reinforce restrictive parenting practices [47]. However, such recommendations may not be generalizable to foster youth as they are a particular vulnerable population of teens. In this paper, we draw from existing literature to argue that researchers and designers will likely need to conceptualize different approaches when studying and developing interactive systems so that they meet the unique needs of foster youth. We do this by synthesizing research regarding the high-risk offline behaviors of foster youth, research that pertains to foster youth and technology use, and, more generally, adolescent online safety literature as it relates to other vulnerable teen populations. Overall, we found evidence that foster youth are particularly susceptible to both offline and online risks, though very little research has empirically examined the role technology may play in exacerbating or mitigating such experiences on or offline. Based on our findings, we urge HCI researchers and interaction designers to engage with foster youth and other Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. IDC 2017, June 27–30, 2017, Stanford, CA, USA. © 2017 ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-4921-5/17/06...$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3078072.3079724