22 research outputs found
From Shadow Profiles to Contact Tracing: Qualitative Research into Consent and Privacy
For many privacy scholars, consent is on life support, if not dead. In July 2020, we held six focus groups in Australia to test this claim by gauging attitudes to consent and privacy, with a spotlight on smartphones. These focus groups included discussion of four case studies: âshadow profilesâ, eavesdropping by companies on smartphone users, non-consensual government surveillance of its citizens and contact tracing apps developed to combat COVID-19. Our participants expressed concerns about these practices and said they valued individual consent and saw it as a key element of privacy protection. However, they saw the limits of individual consent, saying that the law and the design of digital services also have key roles to play. Building on these findings, we argue for a blend of good law, good design and an appreciation that individual consent is still valued and must be fixed rather than discarded - ideally in ways that are also collective. In other words, consent is dead; long live consent.</jats:p
#ArsonEmergency and Australia's "Black Summer": Polarisation and misinformation on social media
During the summer of 2019-20, while Australia suffered unprecedented
bushfires across the country, false narratives regarding arson and limited
backburning spread quickly on Twitter, particularly using the hashtag
#ArsonEmergency. Misinformation and bot- and troll-like behaviour were detected
and reported by social media researchers and the news soon reached mainstream
media. This paper examines the communication and behaviour of two polarised
online communities before and after news of the misinformation became public
knowledge. Specifically, the Supporter community actively engaged with others
to spread the hashtag, using a variety of news sources pushing the arson
narrative, while the Opposer community engaged less, retweeted more, and
focused its use of URLs to link to mainstream sources, debunking the narratives
and exposing the anomalous behaviour. This influenced the content of the
broader discussion. Bot analysis revealed the active accounts were
predominantly human, but behavioural and content analysis suggests Supporters
engaged in trolling, though both communities used aggressive language.Comment: 16 pages, 8 images, presented at the 2nd Multidisciplinary
International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM
2020), Leiden, The Netherlands. Published in: van Duijn M., Preuss M.,
Spaiser V., Takes F., Verberne S. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media.
MISDOOM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12259. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_1
Web Routineness and Limits of Predictability: Investigating Demographic and Behavioral Differences Using Web Tracking Data
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important
for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for
the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and
personalization. In this work, we demonstrate that people tend to follow
routines on the Web, and these repetitive patterns of web visits increase their
browsing behavior's achievable predictability. We present an
information-theoretic framework for measuring the uncertainty and theoretical
limits of predictability of human mobility on the Web. We systematically assess
the impact of different design decisions on the measurement. We apply the
framework to a web tracking dataset of German internet users. Our empirical
results highlight that individual's routines on the Web make their browsing
behavior predictable to 85% on average, though the value varies across
individuals. We observe that these differences in the users' predictabilities
can be explained to some extent by their demographic and behavioral attributes.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. To be published in the proceedings of the
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 202
Diverse Misinformation: Impacts of Human Biases on Detection of Deepfakes on Networks
Social media platforms often assume that users can self-correct against
misinformation. However, social media users are not equally susceptible to all
misinformation as their biases influence what types of misinformation might
thrive and who might be at risk. We call "diverse misinformation" the complex
relationships between human biases and demographics represented in
misinformation. To investigate how users' biases impact their susceptibility
and their ability to correct each other, we analyze classification of deepfakes
as a type of diverse misinformation. We chose deepfakes as a case study for
three reasons: 1) their classification as misinformation is more objective; 2)
we can control the demographics of the personas presented; 3) deepfakes are a
real-world concern with associated harms that must be better understood. Our
paper presents an observational survey (N=2,016) where participants are exposed
to videos and asked questions about their attributes, not knowing some might be
deepfakes. Our analysis investigates the extent to which different users are
duped and which perceived demographics of deepfake personas tend to mislead. We
find that accuracy varies by demographics, and participants are generally
better at classifying videos that match them. We extrapolate from these results
to understand the potential population-level impacts of these biases using a
mathematical model of the interplay between diverse misinformation and crowd
correction. Our model suggests that diverse contacts might provide "herd
correction" where friends can protect each other. Altogether, human biases and
the attributes of misinformation matter greatly, but having a diverse social
group may help reduce susceptibility to misinformation.Comment: Supplementary appendix available upon request for the time bein
âIt wouldn't happen to meâ:Privacy concerns and perspectives following the Cambridge Analytica scandal
In March 2018, news of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal made headlines around the world. By inappropriately collecting data from approximately 87 million usersâ Facebook profiles, the data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica, created psychographically tailored advertisements that allegedly aimed to influence people's voting preferences in the 2016 US presidential election. In the aftermath of this incident, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 30 participants based at a UK university, discussing their understanding of online privacy and how they manage it in the wake of the scandal. We analysed this data using an inductive (i.e. âbottom-upâ) thematic analysis approach. Contrary to many opinions reported in the news, the respondents in our sample did not delete their accounts, frantically change their privacy settings, or even express that much concern. As a result, individuals often consider themselves immune to psychographically tailored advertisements, and lack understanding of how automated approaches and algorithms work in relation to their (and their networksâ) personal data. We discuss our findings in relation to wider related research (e.g. crisis fatigue, networked privacy, Protection Motivation Theory) and discuss directions for future research.</p