Mariam, an 18-year-old student from Nagpur, navigates the complexities of digital access in a household where cultural norms and limited resources constrain her use of a shared mobile phone. Currently in 11th grade, she enjoys playing games on mobile devices but only has access to a shared phone at home, where she lives with her three sisters and parents. Her family and neighbours form judgements on the moral character of young girls who use phones, believing that using a phone or being in touch with friends encourages ‘bad habits’ such as making boyfriends. Mariam can only use the phone at night for an hour or so, once her parents have gone to sleep and there is nobody to supervise her. In this context, she must navigate her digital life using the shared device.

She discovers ‘WhatsappGB’ , an unofficial variation of the popular messaging app. Using it reassures her, as it allows her to add a fingerprint lock to the app, limiting other family members from accessing her personal chats. Whether she is using popular social media applications to post dancing reels, or shopping on e-commerce platforms, every tap, search, and scroll is a balancing act between maintaining her safety, privacy, and managing societal expectations.

In this complex digital landscape, being able to establish trust with digital platforms becomes a precious commodity, as it is the missing link between the user and sustained digital use. However, digital trust is a highly technical concept, influenced largely by concerns of digital security, data privacy, and system accountability. The performance of technology is a chief way in which trust is framed for users across platforms, where risks to safety are dominantly represented by bad actors online. While this can mitigate and improve the ability of digital platforms to protect users from digital threats, there is a need to localise the fluid concept of trust within social security, communal privacy and existing practices of accountability.

For women, particularly in India, trust extends beyond the stable functionality of technology; it involves the navigation of social threats to their digital relationships. Women must grapple with the heavy monitoring of their access by parents and brothers, stemming from their vulnerability to unsolicited sexual requests from strangers and beliefs around women’s lack of competence around digital usage. This social environment around digital devices broadens the concerns of trust and safety in digital spaces – it creates a diminished agency and digital under-confidence for women, which must be treated as other threats are in the context of women’s safe and assertive usage. It is then crucial to re-establish confidence and control in the hands of women to build socially-conscious security and trust, with technology acting as a reliable and assuring ally against threats in all directions.