"There's so much responsibility on users right now:" Expert Advice for Staying Safer From Hate and Harassment

Online hate and harassment poses a threat to the digital safety of people globally. In light of this risk, there is a need to equip as many people as possible with advice to stay safer online. We interviewed 24 experts to understand what threats and advice internet users should prioritize to prevent or mitigate harm. As part of this, we asked experts to evaluate 45 pieces of existing hate-and-harassment-specific digital-safety advice to understand why they felt advice was viable or not. We find that experts frequently had competing perspectives for which threats and advice they would prioritize. We synthesize sources of disagreement, while also highlighting the primary threats and advice where experts concurred. Our results inform immediate efforts to protect users from online hate and harassment, as well as more expansive socio-technical efforts to establish enduring safety.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, 84 reference

Technology for Care Networks of Elders

Computer-supported coordinated care uses technology to aid the network of people who support an elder living at home. The authors conducted interviews with people involved in the care of elders to identify their needs and subsequently conducted an in situ evaluation of a technology probe to study how a CSCC system might help satisfy these needs. The authors used these results to identify challenges faced by people caring for elders and offer guidelines for designers of coordinated care technologies

LOOP:Exploring Physicalization of Activity Tracking Data

Wearables, mobile devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors are enabling us to monitor our environment, understand our social connections, and track our personal health. However, most of these systems communicate data through information visualizations that are often ‘hidden’ inside devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, requiring users to undertake explicit actions to reveal them. Novel interfaces and devices embedded in people’s everyday life have the potential to help users visualize, use, and appropriate their collected personal data. To this end, we designed the physical artifact LOOP, which provides an abstract visualization of the user’s activity data by changing its shape. In this paper, we elaborate on the design and present a one-week field study in which LOOP was deployed in the homes of five end-users. We found that the physical presence of LOOP facilitated reflection and the layered visualization supported various personal tracking

Living in a glass house: a survey of private moments in the home

ABSTRACT As advances in technology accelerate, sensors and recording devices are increasingly being integrated into homes. Although the added benefit of sensing is often clear (e.g., entertainment, security, encouraging sustainable behaviors, etc.), the home is a private and intimate place, with multiple stakeholders who may have competing priorities and tolerances for what is acceptable and useful. In an effort to develop systems that account for the needs and concerns of householders, we conducted an anonymous survey (N = 475) focusing on the activities and habits that people do at home that they would not want to be recorded. In this paper, we discuss those activities and where in the home they are performed, and offer suggestions for the design of UbiComp systems that rely on sensing and recording

Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log, and reflect on their self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, facilitate comparison of goals and achievements, engage viewers with delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable flexible planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach's strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using a role-playing method. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed that they were able to assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, AVI '20, September 28-October 2, 2020, Salerno, Italy 2020 Association for Computing Machiner

SoK: Safer Digital-Safety Research Involving At-Risk Users

Research involving at-risk users -- that is, users who are more likely to experience a digital attack or to be disproportionately affected when harm from such an attack occurs -- can pose significant safety challenges to both users and researchers. Nevertheless, pursuing research in computer security and privacy is crucial to understanding how to meet the digital-safety needs of at-risk users and to design safer technology for all. To standardize and bolster safer research involving such users, we offer an analysis of 196 academic works to elicit 14 research risks and 36 safety practices used by a growing community of researchers. We pair this inconsistent set of reported safety practices with oral histories from 12 domain experts to contribute scaffolded and consolidated pragmatic guidance that researchers can use to plan, execute, and share safer digital-safety research involving at-risk users. We conclude by suggesting areas for future research regarding the reporting, study, and funding of at-risk user researchComment: 13 pages, 3 table

Interacting with eHealth - Towards grand challenges for HCI

While health records are increasingly stored electronically, we, as citizens, have little access to this data about ourselves. We are not used to thinking of these official records either as ours or as useful to us. We increasingly turn to the Web, however, to query any ache, pain or health goal we may have before consulting with health care professionals. Likewise, for proactive health care such as nutrition or fitness, or to find fellow-sufferers for post diagnosis support, we turn to online resources. There is a potential disconnect between points at which professional and lay eHealth data and resources intersect for preventative or proactive health care. Such gaps in information sharing may have direct impact on practices we decide to take up, the care we seek, or the support professionals offer. In this panel, we consider several places within proactive, preventative health care in particular HCI has a role towards enhancing health knowledge discovery and health support interaction. Our goal is to demonstrate how now is the time for eHealth to come to the forefront of the HCI research agenda

SoK: hate, harassment, and the changing landscape of online abuse

We argue that existing security, privacy, and antiabuse protections fail to address the growing threat of online hate and harassment. In order for our community to understand and address this gap, we propose a taxonomy for reasoning about online hate and harassment. Our taxonomy draws on over 150 interdisciplinary research papers that cover disparate threats ranging from intimate partner violence to coordinated mobs. In the process, we identify seven classes of attacks—such as toxic content and surveillance—that each stem from different attacker capabilities and intents. We also provide longitudinal evidence from a three-year survey that hate and harassment is a pervasive, growing experience for online users, particularly for at-risk communities like young adults and people who identify as LGBTQ+. Responding to each class of hate and harassment requires a unique strategy and we highlight five such potential research directions that ultimately empower individuals, communities, and platforms to do so.Accepted manuscrip