"Nothing Can Make Device Sharing Feel Safer..." Privacy and Security Challenges in Collectivist Immigrant Families

Abstract

In collectivist households, sharing digital devices is both a cultural norm and often a material necessity. After migration to more individualistic cultures such as Canada, these sharing practices persist but become entangled with new cultural norms, unfamiliar institutional infrastructures, and highly digitized systems. Immigrant families must adapt to host-country digital life expectations around privacy, safety, schooling, and online services while continuing to uphold home-country norms around family values, moral and collective responsibilities. Devices, in this context become channels through which trust, supervision, autonomy, and cultural expectations are continuously managed and negotiated.

To understand how this negotiation actually plays out, we report findings from a qualitative study of 18 nuclear families, comprising 19 parents and 22 children and young adults, mainly from South Asia. The study examines three intertwined questions: how migration and sociocultural factors shape the security and privacy risks that shared-device households face, how well current devices support or hinder safe sharing once those risks appear, and how can we better design these devices to support safer device sharing. Our findings show that shared-device use exposed families to data breaches, reputational harms, cultural and religious boundary violations, and intergenerational tensions. Moreover, these risks were naturally amplified to household-level concerns because one person’s online activity, account access, or device use could affect any or all other family members.

We find that families often approached shared devices with different goals. Parents sought visibility and control to protect children, preserve cultural and religious values, and manage safety in an unfamiliar digital environment. Children, in contrast, sought autonomy and ways to keep parts of their digital lives separate while still participating in device sharing household practices. Families used ad hoc and reactive strategies to manage these tensions, including monitoring, informal rules, parental control tools, activity concealment, and self censorship practices like keeping devices in a “morally clean” state. However, these strategies were often fragile, easy to workaround, difficult to sustain, or abandoned when they threatened family harmony.

Our findings reveal a mismatch between single-user device assumptions and collectivist immigrants’ household realities of device sharing. Current devices offer limited support for shared use that can balance parental assurance, child privacy, cultural expectations, and everyday usability. Designing for shared-device contexts is therefore essential for building more inclusive digital infrastructures that not only support multicultural families but also others who rely on device sharing. Like curb cuts designed for wheelchair users that ultimately benefit many others, designing from the marginalized can produce more inclusive technologies for everyone.