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What is technology facilitated abuse? · Technology Now

• MICHAEL BIRD Hello and welcome back to Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise where we take what's happening in the world and explore how it's changing the way organizations are using technology. We’re your hosts Michael Bird… AUBREY LOVELL and Aubrey Lovell, and this week we are digging into the darker side of technology. - We’ll be exploring ways in which technology is weaponised by bad faith actors - We’ll be looking at how we can spot when technology is abused in this way - And we’ll be asking how people can be protected against this sort of threat MICHAEL BIRD That is correct, so if you’re the kind of person who needs to know *why* what’s going on in the world, matters to your organisation, this podcast is for you. (oh) And if you haven’t yet done so, do make sure you subscribe to your podcast app of choice so you don’t miss out. Right, let’s get into it! MICHAEL BIRD Technology is advancing g at such a rapid rate that it can be incredibly difficult for us keep up. Not only that, but everyday people are finding ways to use technology which the designers never predicted. In many cases, these novel uses can be exciting however in some situations, people are harnessing new technologies as a tool to harm others. AUBREY LOVELL And as technology is evolving, so are the methods people use to abuse it. It’s not just phishing emails and scams anymore, there’s now a whole world of bad faith actors which we must be on the lookout for in this ongoing arms race between those creating new, and safer, technology and those looking to take advantage of it. Between 2018 and 2022, the UK based charity Refuge saw a 258% increase in the use of technology as a weapon of abuse and researchers in Manchester, also in the UK, announced in a 2024 article that of the over 100 modern day slavery transparency statements they examined from the fashion industry, only 17% referenced using technology to help fight modern day slavery in their supply chains MICHAEL BIRD . Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK and I think probably the wider EU, most websites, most UK-based websites have this sort of modern-day slavery statement, which is quite interesting to flick through because, yeah, organizations these days are having to really consider their supply chains in that way AUBREY LOVELL Right. I mean, I think there's still a lot of work that can be done to improve those stats, but it's definitely eye-opening. 17 % is pretty low. And we have, of course, linked to both of these statistics in the show notes. MICHAEL BIRD So the use of technology both as a tool for abuse, but also as a tool for combatting abuse is a very current and pressing matter, and here to tell us more about this is Joanne O’Connor who works in HPE’s cybersecurity organisation and is the founder of Ireland’s National Cyber Security Awareness Taskforce. MICHAEL BIRD So Joanne, what is Ireland's National Cyber Security Awareness Task Force? JOANNE O’CONNOR So Cyber Awareness Ireland is the overarching umbrella organization that I founded with a friend of mine and a colleague. And underneath that, we created the National Cybersecurity Awareness Task Force. And along the way, we were introduced to professionals in the domestic violence sector, and that was kind of a turning point. So they were seeing more and more cases where technology was being used as a tool of abuse. So things like spyware and stalkerware, you know, tracking devices, and they asked us for help. So the reality is that most frontline workers, they don't get training in this area, and the technology has just moved so fast from when they trained maybe 10, 20 years ago. So yeah, we got stuck in, we developed lots of resources for them. So everything from practical brochures to training sessions. And we even worked with a university here in Ireland and we launched the first ever accredited course specifically designed for frontline workers in technology facilitated abuse. And this now helps them spot and respond to technology facilitated abuse. And we've done it all pro bono. It's been supported by obviously the universities and know, multinationals like HPE, where I work and, you know, through our volunteer hours, we get to do this. MICHAEL BIRD Wow, okay. So you touched on technology facilitated abuse. Can you just sort of explain what that is, how it works and maybe why it's so prevalent in 2025? JOANNE O’CONNOR So technology facilitated abuse is when technology is used to control, stalk, threaten or harm someone. That's kind of the official definition. And often it's in a domestic or an intimate relationship and it can be kind of as simple but still as dangerous as someone kind of, you know, checking your phone or tracking your location maybe, without permission. And it can then go to be as complex as, know, spyware, hacked accounts, maybe someone creating fake profiles. And there's even been a rise in smart home devices being used to intimidate as well. So the same kind of nefarious use of technology can be used in cases, kind of in other industries like modern slavery. So the more we understand how technology can be misused in one context, then we're better equipped to spot it and prevent it in these other settings too. MICHAEL BIRD So you touched on... modern slavery, can you just again sort of explain to listeners what we mean by that and I suppose what it looks like in practice? JOANNE O’CONNOR Modern slavery refers to situations where individuals are exploited and cannot leave a certain situation due to threats or violence and it's essentially kind of an abuse of power. So it's essentially someone exploiting another human being for some type of commercial or personal gain. And the problem is huge and it's really kind of hard to explain it. Like the latest stats, there's around fifty million people living in modern slavery worldwide. So there's about half of those are in forced labour situations and then another half are in forced marriage. MICHAEL BIRD And so how is technology used in cases of modern day slavery? JOANNE O’CONNOR You have technology that's being used in the before part, so that's the recruitment, and then the after aspect. So that's the monitoring and tracking after someone's been kind of exploited and brought into a modern slavery situation. So you've got technology being used to facilitate the recruitment. So this primarily happens through online platforms, groups, marketplaces. And it can look like... basically job ads, but they're obviously false job ads that can be promising like a better life. Maybe it's in a new country. And then after the person has been recruited and trafficked, the technology can then be deployed to further, you know, the traffickers use it for surveillance monitoring to basically control their victims. MICHAEL BIRD So, and people who are trapped in modern day slavery are often then forced to use technology to exploit others. So it of becomes a bit of a cycle. JOANNE O’CONNOR Yeah, this is a really interesting rise of victims becoming perpetrators through modern slavery. And there's, one specific example, there's been a rise in what are called scam compounds. so victims, they're often lured in by these fake job ads that I mentioned, and then they're trafficked to these compounds. if you've ever received a scam phone call or you've been a victim, you don't expect that the person phoning you may actually be trapped and trafficked themselves. MICHAEL BIRD I guess the sort of dichotomy here is that technology is being used to sort of perpetrate modern-day slavery and technology-facilitated abuse, but I suppose it could also be used to fight it as well? JOANNE O’CONNOR So like most things, definitely. So technology can be used for harm or to help. And the key is who's in control and how it's designed effectively. So thankfully there is really good examples of tech being used to fight modern day slavery. One of them is the, it's a campaign called Stop the Traffic. So it's a global campaign and it brought together major kind of tech companies, financial institutions and law enforcement. they essentially built a platform and it combines data from multiple sources and sectors. And what they were able to do then was identify trafficking kind of patterns and hotspots. So like as each individual organization, they wouldn't have been able to kind of build this intelligence. It’s only when you connect all those dots across the sectors then they can start to see the bigger picture and that they can act on it. MICHAEL BIRD One of the things you talked about was sort of training frontline workers, training people who are currently being taught to recognize the signs of modern-day slavery or abuse… Can you just talk about why that is so important and maybe where that gap in knowledge has come from? JOANNE O’CONNOR So digital literacy is key, but we also need the big, you know, platform stepping up. So it's one thing to educate people on how to spot a scam and fake job ads, and that's obviously really important. But if we're serious about preventing the exploitation, again, you're talking about nearly 50 million people here, we need to deal with the problem at scale. So really before those ads ever reach somebody who's vulnerable and might become a victim. It was in 2024, so Google, they released this ad safety report and they said that they blocked and removed 5.1 billion ads globally. And they also suspended over 39 million advertiser accounts, So if the platforms can stop those before they're even seen, and we're educating people at the same time, it's a double win. Like you're cutting off the scam at the source and you're also strengthening the person on the receiving end. AUBREY LOVELL Thanks so much, Joanne. This is a really important topic and I’m glad you’re helping us understand more about it. I don’t think any of us ever consider that the people trying to scam us could also be victims. It really is a very interesting change of perspective to consider. MICHAEL BIRD Alright then. Now it’s time for “Today I learned”, the part of the show where we take a look at something happening in the world that we think you should know about. Aubrey, what have you got for us this week… AUBREY LOVELL Okay, so a warning for anyone who doesn't like snakes. You might wanna skip forwards a couple of minutes because this week we're talking all about snake venom, which is really well-timed because last week my dog was actually bit by a snake, but it was a non-venomous one, so. MICHAEL BIRD What? Hey, last week, right, the UK is not known for its snake population. Last week, I stumbled across my first snake I've ever seen in the UK. AUBREY LOVELL Oh wow. Oh my gosh, that's pretty crazy. I would also be a little frightened to see a snake in the UK. I would never expect to see that. But here in Florida, we do have them and we have them a lot, especially this time of year in the springtime, right? So this is a perfectly timed story. And unlike that snake, we're talking about snake venom, which is obviously pretty gnarly. And what's worse is that each species of venomous snake has a whole cocktail of toxins which they can inject into you. And it's not just one. So this makes treating snake bites with anti-venom Now snake venom is pretty gnarly and what’s worse is that each species of venomous snake has a whole cocktail of toxins which they can inject into you – it’s not just one. This makes treating snakebites with anti-venom incredibly difficult because you need to know the exact species of snake which bit you to be able to treat it properly and quickly. Like you only have so much time to handle this, right? This problem is so extreme that there are over one hundred thousand deaths, and three hundred thousand permanent disabilities caused in humans every year by venomous snake bites. Anti-venom is currently made by injecting tiny quantities of venom into animals who produce antibodies to fight the venom – kind of like a vaccine really. These antibodies are then harvested from the animal and used in antivenom therapies. Creating what’s known as a “broadly neutralising antibody” which is something that works on multiple types of snakebite, has seemed like the elusive holy grail… until now. In an attempt to build up an immunity to snake venom to protect himself while handling them, Tim Friede spent almost two decades injecting himself over 700 times, that’s insane, with venom from the world’s deadliest snakes. MICHAEL BIRD Woah that is hardcore. That is hardcore. AUBREY LOVELL Talk about dedication. I mean, I've heard about this before, right? Like, you see, like, certain snake handlers, when they're using this type of, like, demonstration that they do inject themselves to make themselves more resistant to any bites that could occur, right? But when researchers discovered that Mr. Friede had been doing, they took some of his blood and examined it. And in the blood, they discovered two of these broadly neutralizing antibodies, which targeted neurotoxins – and that’s the sort of thing you find in cobra bites. The researchers added a third drug to the two they had extracted from Friede’s blood and discovered they had made an antivenom which, in animal testing, protected against fatal doses of venom from 13 of the 19 snakes being investigated. This antivenom even provided partial protection against the remaining six . So, a pretty significant find. The lead researcher believes that this antivenom cocktail likely also protects “against a whole bunch of [snakes] for which there is no current antivenom”. So that’s pretty cool. MICHAEL BIRD That is pretty cool. Snakebites isn't something I think about on daily basis, but that being said, that is pretty cool, isn't it? I mean, what a servant to Snakebites, Mr. Tim Friede. AUBREY LOVELL It’s pretty cool. Alright, now it’s time to return to Joanne O’Connor who tells us more about technology facilitated abuse. MICHAEL BIRD Okay so technology isn't just used in modern day slavery, it's also used in many cases of things like domestic abuse. How can we combat this use of technology? JOANNE O’CONNOR So this is a really fascinating parallel, and it's one I came across early in my work. So before I started focusing on modern slavery, I'd been working on technology facilitated abuse within that domestic violence sector. We started to unpack how traffickers operate, their patterns of control and the way that they weaponize technology, was, you know, strangely familiar. So the technology is often the same. You've got the stalker wearing phones, the tracking apps, the hidden GPS devices. And a tracker might use those tools to control someone across borders, but a domestic abuser might use the exact same methods to monitor and to isolate a partner. So the abuse looks different on the surface but underneath it's actually the same playbook. It's just being applied in a different setting. MICHAEL BIRD Gosh, okay. And how has this evolved over the last, five or ten years as technology has got smaller, smarter, faster? JOANNE O’CONNOR when the contacts we had within the domestic violence sector in Ireland came to us, they would have frontline workers who, when they initially trained in this space, when they went to college, let's say even 15 years ago, this is not an element that they get educated in. And that's why, you know, they reached out to us, they reached out to people in cybersecurity because the number of cases where technology is woven into it, it's in the high 90s. So it has exploded. It's literally a tool of choice nowadays for perpetrators. MICHAEL BIRD so we talked about Cyber Awareness Ireland. Have you worked with or have any other countries run similar campaigns JOANNE O’CONNOR my go-to when I talk about this is Australia. They are years ahead. They've been leading the way for years. So Australia have an e-safety office and an e-safety commission. And theirs is more of a government led model. When we looked at it in Ireland, ours is built more from the ground up, which we're actually quite proud of because it shows that what can be done when people spot a gap and a need and kind of step in MICHAEL BIRD So I guess there are like three, maybe four parties at play here. There's, you know, the governments, there's businesses, I guess there are the users of the technology and maybe there are people who are sort of somewhere in the middle. Who has responsibility here? JOANNE O’CONNOR I think my opinion is that the main, so the people who build the technology, feel have… they're definitely at the start of the process and they should take a lot of that responsibility. People might've heard of safety by design and I think it's one of the biggest ways that we're going to combat this. MICHAEL BIRD Can you give some examples of where maybe some products were built with safety by design in mind or maybe they were built and they maybe perhaps should have thought about safety by design. JOANNE O’CONNOR From talking with the frontline workers, there's definitely technology apps that are being used because safety by design was not considered. I know definitely some money transferring apps today were being leveraged by perpetrators because let's say a victim survivor had, you know, blocked them on all the usual necessary platforms but then what was left open was money transfer apps. So you wouldn't expect that this would be like a mechanism, but what was happening with some perpetrators might've been sending like one cent to their victim along with very abusive messages. And it's like this Pandora's box is opened when it happens and then you just see it everywhere. And that's why you're then able to recognize those patterns across modern slavery. It's like, OK, this is everywhere. This is endemic. MICHAEL BIRD So I guess to wrap up safety by design then, where do you begin with a safety by design process? Like who do you speak to? Is there a, you know, is there somebody nationally that you should speak to or there, you know, organizations or groups, not-for-profits, charities that you should be speaking to? JOANNE O’CONNOR Safety by design, I think they seem to be, from my awareness, it's being built into certain university courses now, which is exactly where it should be. If, you know, developing courses, coding courses, and you even see it across the cybersecurity sector, it's the same, you hear the same narrative. It's like, don't bake in security at the end, know, security from a cyber perspective in general, let's say from a large organization. Shouldn't be just this afterthought. MICHAEL BIRD Okay, so Joanne, to wrap up then, why should organizations care about technology facilitated abuse, security by design and modern slavery? JOANNE O’CONNOR All of it together does boil down to just proper ethical business practices… So it comes back to what we are doing and being very transparent because our customers care. And that's honestly what it boils down to. we really should be thinking about protecting the people that we design technology for. Because if we build technology blindly and don't think about our customers and think about the ways it's going to be used for good and evil, then we're doing a disservice to society. AUBREY LOVELL Joanne, that was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for spending some time with us to talk about this. We spend so much time talking about how exciting technology is on this show but I think it’s really important to have to consider how people might abuse the very tech that is helping us. This is an international issue and it really needs an international approach to fighting it – both in helping potential victims or survivors become more technologically literate to protect them, and also in companies designing their products to make them as hard as possible to misuse. AUBREY LOVELL Right then, we are getting towards the end of the show which means it’s time for This Week In History. Michael, you had last week’s clue – something about our atmosphere right? MICHAEL BIRD Pretty much, Aubrey. Last week’s clue was: Its 1990 and this first light has been seen without our pesky atmosphere getting in the way ... What did you think it was last week? AUBREY LOVELL I mean, when I first read it, I was like, I didn't even think of telescopes. I know you mentioned the Hubble, but I think you're closer to the right answer than I was. I took a guess, but I didn't really think it through. MICHAEL BIRD I can reveal that this is the story of the first photo from the Hubble Space Telescope, which of course was named…. First Light. Now by placing Hubble in space, atmospheric disturbance could be removed from the images leading to a much cleaner photos of the cosmos. Now Aubrey, our producer has actually given us a copy of the first picture from the Hubble with a photo of the same part of space as seen from the ground. So the first photo, can you just sort of describe the first photo? The one taken on the ground… AUBREY LOVELL Well, it's definitely grainy. It's black and white. There's like four dots, not a lot of dimension. You don't really know what you're looking at. There's not a lot of context. So it's from the ground, not great. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, it's pretty pixelated, pretty grainy. Okay, so the first photo from the Hubble Space Telescope I have next to me. Now, those four dots have actually turned into five dots because one of the big dots is actually, looks like it's two dots, two little stars. I can see a little shooting star, maybe some really, really, really faint specks that I guess might have been other stars. Photos from the Hubble were about 50 % sharper than the pictures taken from the ground and I think you can really see that in those photos, but they weren't completely clear because of an issue with the mirrors used in the telescope which wasn't discovered until after it left Earth. my goodness, the stress of that. And it would take a further three years before the issue was resolved with the installation in space of a redesigned wild field and planetary camera along with an instrument called COSTAR . Right, so we've got some more photos so I'll just describe what you can see on the photo, the left-hand photo which I think is the before photo. AUBREY LOVELL first glance is it kind of looks like a hurricane. MICHAEL BIRD It does look like a satellite view of a hurricane from the top. AUBREY LOVELL It definitely does. There's a lot of blue hues. It's also very grainy, but you're starting to see more color. And then on the right, obviously with the updates, it's much clearer. You can see the definition and the patterns and the stars. The coloring is much better. There's more clarity. MICHAEL BIRD It's one of those photos, the updated one, looks like one of those photos you could just stare at for hours. You could see what, thousand different little stars and, you know, planets and objects. Whereas the one on the left is, it's a bit of a blurry mush, isn't it? Well the Hubble is still taking images today, 35 years after it was sent into space for what was expected to be a 15 year mission and is expected to continue its work for at least another decade. What do you think of that, Aubrey? AUBREY LOVELL I think that's amazing. Keep them coming. MICHAEL BIRD Right then, Aubrey you’ve got next week’s clue – what is it? AUBREY LOVELL I do Michael. It’s 1919 and this a solar eclipse is about to prove this theory relatively correct...i [[Michael/Aubrey discussion]] MICHAEL BIRD Uh… I don’t know. Is it something to do with, I want to say… relativity? Like Einstein’s theory of relativity… no that would be ridiculous. AUBREY LOVELL Well producer Harry did italicise that word so we know that something’s going on there. AUBREY LOVELL And with that, it brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Joanne, And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now at HP dot com. Technology Now is hosted by Aubrey Lovell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Alissa Mitry and Renee Edwards. AUBREY LOVELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!