“I thought you were okay”: Participatory Design with Young Adults to Fight Multiparty Privacy Conflicts in Online Social Networks

International audienceWhile sharing multimedia content on Online Social Networks (OSNs) has many benefits, exposing other people without obtaining permission could cause Multiparty Privacy Conflicts (MPCs). Earlier studies developed technical solutions and dissuasive approaches to address MPCs. However, none of these studies involved OSN users who have experienced MPCs, in the design process, possibly overlooking the valuable experiences these individuals might have accrued. To fill this gap, we recruited participants specifically from this population of users, and involved them in participatory design sessions aiming at ideating solutions to reduce the incidence of MPCs. To frame the activities of our participants, we borrowed terminology and concepts from a well known framework used in the justice systems. Over the course of several design sessions, our participants designed 10 solutions to mitigate MPCs. The designed solutions leverage different mechanisms, including preventing MPCs from happening, dissuading users from sharing, mending the harm, and educating users about the community standards. We discuss the open design and research opportunities suggested by the designed solutions and we contribute an ideal workflow that synthesizes the best of each solution. This study contributes to the innovation of privacy-enhancing technologies to limit the incidences of MPCs in OSNs

Automated privacy negotiations with preference uncertainty

Many service providers require permissions to access privacy-sensitive data that are not necessary for their core functionality. To support users’ privacy management, we propose a novel agent-based negotiation framework to negotiate privacy permissions between users and service providers using a new multi-issue alternating-offer protocol based on exchanges of partial and complete offers. Additionally, we introduce a novel approach to learning users’ preferences in negotiation and present two variants of this approach: one variant personalised to each individual user, and one personalised depending on the user’s privacy type. To evaluate them, we perform a user study with participants, using an experimental tool installed on the participants’ mobile devices. We compare the take-it-or-leave-it approach, in which users are required to accept all permissions requested by a service, to negotiation, which respects their preferences. Our results show that users share personal data 2.5 times more often when they are able to negotiate while maintaining the same level of decision regret. Moreover, negotiation can be less mentally demanding than the take-it-or-leave-it approach and it allows users to align their privacy choices with their preferences. Finally, our findings provide insight into users’ data sharing strategies to guide the future of automated and negotiable privacy management mechanisms

Preserving Privacy as Social Responsibility in Online Social Networks

Online social networks provide an environment for their users to share content with others, where the user who shares a content item is put in charge, generally ignoring others that might be affected by it. However, a content that is shared by one user can very well violate the privacy of other users. To remedy this, ideally, all users who are related to a content should get a say in how the content should be shared. Recent approaches advocate the use of agreement technologies to enable stakeholders of a post to discuss the privacy configurations of a post. This allows related individuals to express concerns so that various privacy violations are avoided up front. Existing techniques try to establish an agreement on a single post. However, most of the time, agreement should be established over multiple posts such that the user can tolerate slight breaches of privacy in return of a right to share posts themselves in future interactions. As a result, users can help each other preserve their privacy, viewing this as their social responsibility. This article develops a reciprocity-based negotiation for reaching privacy agreements among users and introduces a negotiation architecture that combines semantic privacy rules with utility functions. We evaluate our approach over multiagent simulations with software agents that mimic users based on a user study

Preserving Privacy as Social Responsibility in Online Social Networks

Online social networks provide an environment for their users to share content with others, where the user who shares a content item is put in charge, generally ignoring others that might be affected by it. However, a content that is shared by one user can very well violate the privacy of other users. To remedy this, ideally, all users who are related to a content should get a say in how the content should be shared. Recent approaches advocate the use of agreement technologies to enable stakeholders of a post to discuss the privacy configurations of a post. This allows related individuals to express concerns so that various privacy violations are avoided up front. Existing techniques try to establish an agreement on a single post. However, most of the time, agreement should be established over multiple posts such that the user can tolerate slight breaches of privacy in return of a right to share posts themselves in future interactions. As a result, users can help each other preserve their privacy, viewing this as their social responsibility. This article develops a reciprocity-based negotiation for reaching privacy agreements among users and introduces a negotiation architecture that combines semantic privacy rules with utility functions. We evaluate our approach over multiagent simulations with software agents that mimic users based on a user study

Mechanisms of moral responsibilities: Designing and deploying digital technologies for perpetrators of domestic violence

PhD ThesisWhere prevention and intervention resources should be focused to mitigate domestic violence is an important topic within academic policy and practice. While there are a range of digital tools available to support victim-survivors subject to domestic violence, no tools have been designed to challenge the abusive and harmful behaviours of perpetrators. In this thesis, I explore the experience of how existing and novel technologies used in the context of perpetrator interventions in the third sector within the United Kingdom are being leveraged to rebalance the over-responsibility society bestows on victim-survivors, along with the under-responsibility we ascribe to perpetrators. I accomplish this through developing a conceptual framework that seeks to promote spaces for design and further intervention capable of assisting such organisations in holding perpetrators responsible for their abusive behaviours and facilitating their journey of behaviour and attitude change towards non-violence. Through this work, I conceptualise the compelling moral responsibilities intrinsic to interactions with technological systems between perpetrators and support workers, which I elicit through a focused ethnography. I highlight four spaces of negotiation concerning a person’s responsibility for changing their abusive behaviour, which I refer to as ‘mechanisms’ to convey their fundamental and interconnected nature: self-awareness, acknowledging the extent of harms, providing peer support, and being accountable to demonstrate change. To further investigate these spaces for negotiation, I conducted three studies to understand the contextual dependencies of design that focuses on the responsibility of domestic violence perpetrators through: (1) the development of an interactive storytelling system to promote learning about agency and perspective-taking, (2) the design of a smartphone application to support crisis management and the prevention of physical violence, and (3) the design, deployment and evaluation of an asynchronous peer support process between two groups of perpetrators. The outcomes of this conceptual and empirical inquiry are manifold. First, I provide a detailed account of how responsibility is explored in practice between support workers and perpetrators to suggest design considerations for future systems in this context. Secondly, I provide a conceptual framework to aid researchers and designers in better navigating designing for responsibilities for violent behaviours, and outline implications for how this might be achieved. Finally, I offer a methodological and ethical ii considerations which outlines ways in which support workers and perpetrators can be actively included within the co-design of digital tools while mitigating the elevation of risk. These contributions aim to fundamentally reimagine the roles and possibilities for digital tools within domestic violence, looking beyond today’s victim-focused and security-oriented paradigms to propose a more transformative orientation focused on preventing the harm done by perpetrators