Mohamed Moustafa Dawoud

I am a PhD student in Computer Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, co-advised by Prof. Ram Sundara Raman and Prof. Leilani Gilpin. I am also a Research Technologist Intern in the Audits Division at the California Privacy Protection Agency. I study AI-enabled privacy risks and abuse as sociotechnical problems: how they affect people, and how the people affected keep up with them or fail to. On the harm side, that means new forms of abuse such as non-consensual deepfakes, synthetic media, and abuse sold as a service. On the human side, it means how everyday users form mental models of digital protections, how engineers and practitioners weigh privacy trade-offs under regulatory pressure, and how policymakers read ambiguous or conflicting frameworks. I use large-scale internet measurements, qualitative interviews, and controlled experiments to find where these groups are misaligned. I am also asking whether AI can be turned into a tool for defense: whether the same technology can help users recognize and resist threats, help practitioners build safer systems under regulatory uncertainty, and give policymakers the empirical grounding they need to act.