Online Personal Data Processing and EU Data Protection Reform. CEPS Task Force Report, April 2013

This report sheds light on the fundamental questions and underlying tensions between current policy objectives, compliance strategies and global trends in online personal data processing, assessing the existing and future framework in terms of effective regulation and public policy. Based on the discussions among the members of the CEPS Digital Forum and independent research carried out by the rapporteurs, policy conclusions are derived with the aim of making EU data protection policy more fit for purpose in today’s online technological context. This report constructively engages with the EU data protection framework, but does not provide a textual analysis of the EU data protection reform proposal as such

OSD2F: An Open-Source Data Donation Framework

The digital traces that people leave through their use of various online platforms provide tremendous opportunities for studying human behavior. However, the collection of these data is hampered by legal, ethical, and technical challenges. We present a framework and tool for collecting these data through a data donation platform where consenting participants can securely submit their digital traces. This approach leverages recent developments in data rights that have given people more control over their own data, such as legislation that now mandates companies to make digital trace data available on request in a machine-readable format. By transparently requesting access to specific parts of this data for clearly communicated academic purposes, the data ownership and privacy of participants is respected, and researchers are less dependent on commercial organizations that store this data in proprietary archives. In this paper we outline the general design principles, the current state of the tool, and future development goals

From Awareness to Action: Exploring End-User Empowerment Interventions for Dark Patterns in UX

The study of UX dark patterns, i.e., UI designs that seek to manipulate user behaviors, often for the benefit of online services, has drawn significant attention in the CHI and CSCW communities in recent years. To complement previous studies in addressing dark patterns from (1) the designer's perspective on education and advocacy for ethical designs; and (2) the policymaker's perspective on new regulations, we propose an end-user-empowerment intervention approach that helps users (1) raise the awareness of dark patterns and understand their underlying design intents; (2) take actions to counter the effects of dark patterns using a web augmentation approach. Through a two-phase co-design study, including 5 co-design workshops (N=12) and a 2-week technology probe study (N=15), we reported findings on the understanding of users' needs, preferences, and challenges in handling dark patterns and investigated the feedback and reactions to users' awareness of and action on dark patterns being empowered in a realistic in-situ setting.Comment: Conditionally Accepted at CSCW 202

How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research? (Extended Version)

In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations.Comment: This paper is the extended version of the paper presented at USENIX SECURITY 202

Social Media Monitoring During Elections: Cases and Best Practice to Inform Electoral Observation Missions

Concern over online interference in elections is now widespread—from the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the pernicious effects messaging apps have had in elections in Kenya or Brazil. Yet regulatory and monitoring efforts have lagged behind in addressing the challenges of how public opinion can be manipulated online, and its impact on elections. The phenomenon of online electoral interference is global. It affects established democracies, countries in transition, and places where freedom of expression and access to information are tightly controlled.But fundamental questions of what should be legal and illegal in digital political communication have yet to be answered in order to extend the rule of electoral law from the offline to the online. Answering these questions would help determine the right scope for online election observation, too. This scoping report explains why social media is one of the elements of a democratic, rule of law–based state that observer groups should monitor. It aggregates experience from diverse civil society and nongovernmental initiatives that are innovating in this field, and sets out questions to guide the development of new mandates for election observers. The internet and new digital tools are profoundly reshaping political communication and campaigning. But an independent and authoritative assessment of the impact of these effects is wanting. Election observation organizations need to adapt their mandate and methodology in order to remain relevant and protect the integrity of democratic processes

Detecting Deceptive Dark-Pattern Web Advertisements for Blind Screen-Reader Users

Advertisements have become commonplace on modern websites. While ads are typically designed for visual consumption, it is unclear how they affect blind users who interact with the ads using a screen reader. Existing research studies on non-visual web interaction predominantly focus on general web browsing; the specific impact of extraneous ad content on blind users\u27 experience remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we conducted an interview study with 18 blind participants; we found that blind users are often deceived by ads that contextually blend in with the surrounding web page content. While ad blockers can address this problem via a blanket filtering operation, many websites are increasingly denying access if an ad blocker is active. Moreover, ad blockers often do not filter out internal ads injected by the websites themselves. Therefore, we devised an algorithm to automatically identify contextually deceptive ads on a web page. Specifically, we built a detection model that leverages a multi-modal combination of handcrafted and automatically extracted features to determine if a particular ad is contextually deceptive. Evaluations of the model on a representative test dataset and \u27in-the-wild\u27 random websites yielded F1 scores of 0.86 and 0.88, respectively

Role of asynchronous awareness in digital art creation

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-85).The majority of visitors to sites on the World Wide Web (WWW) have traditionally been only passive observers; consumers of previously created content. More recently, however, these users have been encouraged to contribute to these sites, opening the door to new forms of creative self expression. As we enter this new era of widespread collaboration and sharing made possible by the WWW, one question that remains is how to build appropriate communication channels to and from this new medium with respect to the tools used for digitally mediated creative expression. In this thesis, I will attempt to formulate a coherent set of characteristics that both creative programming environments and their associated WWW sites must possess to help improve, inspire, and support the work of creative individuals using these systems, which I will refer to as architectures for web-based collectivity.by Kyle Matthew Buza.S.M