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Sex, Scams and Videotape: How Scottish Care Workers Navigate Cyber Safety Ethics

Namrata Primlani ; Lynne Coventry (2026) — Proceedings of the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’26), October 3–7, 2026, Vaasa, Finland

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DOI: 10.1145/3829807.3829891 (opens in a new tab)

Country:   Scotland
Tags:   Care Ethics, Cyber Safety, Digital Consent, Ethical Displacement, Romance Scams, Scotland, Social Care, Vulnerable Adults
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Synopsis

            
The article investigates how frontline social care workers in Scotland navigate cyber safety ethics when supporting adults with cognitive, physical, and social vulnerabilities. Using a qualitative study of nine care workers spanning management, technology, and front-line roles, the authors explore the day-to-day ethical challenges that arise as digital tools and online risks become embedded in care delivery. The study identifies four recurring tensions that shape cyber safety practice: responsibility versus control, innovation versus stability, care versus capacity, and safety versus dignity. It frames these issues through the lenses of ethical workloads and ethical displacement, whereby unresolved questions about consent, privacy, and risk are shifted onto frontline staff. The findings show that staff routinely balance concerns about safeguarding with respect for autonomy and privacy, often in the absence of clear guidance. Examples include GDPR considerations, monitoring and location-tracking debates, intimate surveillance in homes, and young service users pursuing online sexual exploration or uncertain financial guidance from online interactions. Participants describe making case-by-case judgments in dialogue with service users and families, rather than applying uniform rules or depending on existing tech-centric solutions. The authors argue that technology alone cannot resolve these dilemmas and that ethical decision making is deeply relational and situational. In response, the paper advocates for non-technological design and policy approaches that foreground dialogue, dignity, and practical care planning. It proposes design directions such as embedding cyber safety discussions into care plans, developing educational tools for care workers, and creating conversation-support technologies that aid ethical deliberation rather than simply monitoring behavior. The study notes limitations in scope and generalizability due to the small, Scotland-specific sample, but highlights an emergent need to treat cyber safety as ethical care work requiring dialogue and organizational support.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
Formal social care workers’ experiences of cyber safety remain underexplored, as prior technology-caregiving research has largely focused on family or domestic caregiving. The paper identifies limited care-ethics research on emerging cyber-safety challenges, unclear guidance for frontline workers on consent, privacy, autonomy, and risk, and a lack of nontechnological tools for discussing ethical values in care work.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
The study used approximately one-hour online semi-structured Microsoft Teams interviews with nine Scottish social care workers from nine organizations. Participants were purposively sampled across management, frontline service, and technology roles, with snowball sampling. Transcripts were generated with a GDPR-compliant tool, manually checked, and analyzed inductively through thematic analysis. Twenty-four initial themes were grouped into four categories, producing four ethical tensions.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The small qualitative sample covered varied roles and organizations, so findings are not necessarily generalizable. High social-care staff turnover hindered follow-up interviews for validating themes and testing design ideas. Recruitment was difficult because participants faced high workloads. The time-limited commissioned project relied only on interviews; the authors note that workshops and co-creation could provide additional insight.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Future research should develop and evaluate tools that support ethical decision-making in care settings, using ethical displacement as a framework. The authors recommend workshops and co-creation with care workers, collaboratively designed guidelines and educational tools, and nontechnical supports for cyber-safety dialogue. They also call for research and design focused on stable, practical technologies rather than novelty.

          

              

    
    

        
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