Fair, Equitable, and Just: A Socio-technical Approach to Online Safety

Socio-technical systems have been revolutionary in reshaping how people maintain relationships, learn about new opportunities, engage in meaningful discourse, and even express grief and frustrations. At the same time, these systems have been central in the proliferation of harmful behaviors online as internet users are confronted with serious and pervasive threats at alarming rates. Although researchers and companies have attempted to develop tools to mitigate threats, the perception of dominant (often Western) frameworks as the standard for the implementation of safety mechanisms fails to account for imbalances, inequalities, and injustices in non-Western civilizations like the Caribbean. Therefore, in this dissertation I adopt a holistic approach to online safety that acknowledges the complexities of harms for understudied populations specifically focusing on the Caribbean. In this dissertation, I conduct three studies that take steps towards (1) filling in the gap of missing empirical understanding around users’ perceptions of safety threats and how that is associated with their intentions to engage with supportive countermeasures, (2) understanding the gaps in current approaches to justice, and (3) developing an understanding towards the development of equitable and inclusive countermeasures. In the first study, I conduct a region-wide survey which reveals Caribbean citizens experience high rates of exposure to online threats. Moreover, I show that by conceptually defining protective behaviors based on the threats that they address, it exposes how the perceptions of threats influences the adoption of online safety countermeasures while uncovering distinctions in perceptions depending on the type of harm. The second study utilizes a multi-disciplinary approach to understand the state of legislative protections. Through a reflective legislative and media analysis, the study uncovered major discrepancies in the region’s approach towards justice in online spaces. Lastly, the final study incorporates the findings of these works by conducting an online experiment to test the design of justice-oriented safety countermeasures. The results provide support for the development of countermeasures that people perceive to be fair, equitable, and just

The Pursuit of Transparency and Control: A Classification of Ad Explanations in Social Media

Online advertising on social media platforms has been at the center of recent controversies over growing concerns regarding users\u27 privacy, dishonest data collection, and a lack of transparency and control. Facing public pressure, some social media platforms have opted to implement explanatory tools in an effort to empower consumers and shed light on marketing practices. Yet, to date research shows significant inconsistencies around how ads should be explained. To address this issue, we conduct a systematic literature review on ad explanations, covering existing research on how they are generated, presented, and perceived by users. Based on this review, we present a classification scheme of ad explanations that offers insights into the reasoning behind the ad recommendation, the objective of the explanation, the content of the explanation, and how this content should be presented. Moreover, we identify challenges that are unaddressed by either current research or explanatory tools deployed in practice, and we discuss avenues for future research to address these challenges. This paper calls attention to and helps to solidify an agenda for interdisciplinary communities to collaboratively approach the design and implementation of explanations for online ads in social media

Emotional and Practical Considerations Towards the Adoption and Abandonment of VPNs as a Privacy-Enhancing Technology

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can help people protect their privacy. Despite this, VPNs are not widely used among the public. In this survey study about the adoption and usage of VPNs, we investigate people’s motivation to use VPNs and the barriers they encounter in adopting them. Using data from 90 technologically savvy participants, we find that while nearly all (98%; 88) of the participants have knowledge about what VPNs are, less than half (42%; 37) have ever used VPNs primarily as a privacy-enhancing technology. Of these, 18% (7) abandoned using VPNs while 81% (30) continue to use them to protect their privacy online. In a qualitative analysis of survey responses, we find that people who adopt and continue to use VPNs for privacy purposes are primarily motivated by emotional considerations, including the strong desire to protect their privacy online, wide fear of surveillance and data tracking not only from Internet service providers (ISPs) but also governments and Internet corporations such as Facebook and Google. In contrast, people who are mainly motivated by practical considerations are more likely to abandon VPNs, especially once their practical need no longer exists. These people cite their access to alternative technologies and the effort required to use a VPN as reasons for abandonment. We discuss implications of these findings and provide suggestions on how to maximize adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies such as VPNs, focusing on how to align them with people’s interests and privacy risk evaluation

Moving Beyond A “One-Size Fits All” Approach: Exploring Individual Differences In Privacy

As our lives become increasingly digitized, how people maintain and manage their networked privacy has become a formidable challenge for academics, practitioners, and policy-makers. A shift toward people-centered privacy initiatives has shown promise; yet many applications still adopt a “one-size fits all” approach, which fails to consider how individual differences in concerns, preferences, and behaviors shape how different people interact with and use technology. The main goal of this workshop is to highlight individual differences (e.g., age, culture, personal preference) that influence users’ experiences and privacy-related outcomes. We will work towards best practices for research, design, and online privacy regulation policies that consider these differences

Privacy at a Glance: The User-Centric Design of Glanceable Data Exposure Visualizations

Smartphone users are often unaware of mobile applications’ (“apps”) third-party data collection and sharing practices, which put them at higher risk of privacy breaches. One way to raise awareness of these practices is by providing unobtrusive but pervasive visualizations that can be presented in a glanceable manner. In this paper, we applied Wogalter et al.’s Communication-Human Information Processing model (C-HIP) to design and prototype eight different visualizations that depict smartphone apps’ data sharing activities. We varied the granularity and type (i.e., data-centric or app-centric) of information shown to users and used the screensaver/lock screen as a design probe. Through interview-based design probes with Android users (n=15), we investigated the aspects of the data exposure visualizations that influenced users’ comprehension and privacy awareness. Our results shed light on how users’ perceptions of privacy boundaries influence their preference regarding the information structure of these visualizations, and the tensions that exist in these visualizations between glanceability and granularity. We discuss how a pervasive, soft paternalistic approach to privacy-related visualization may raise awareness by enhancing the transparency of information flow, thereby, unobtrusively increasing users’ understanding of data sharing practices of mobile apps. We also discuss implications for privacy research and glanceable security

Reading news with a purpose: Explaining user profiles for self-actualization

Personalized content provided by recommender systems is an integral part of the current online news reading experience. However, news recommender systems are criticized for their'black-box' approach to data collection and processing, and for their lack of explainability and transparency. This paper focuses on explaining user profiles constructed from aggregated reading behavior data, used to provide content-based recommendations. The paper makes a first step toward consolidating epistemic values of news providers and news readers. We present an evaluation of an explanation interface reflecting these values, and find that providing users with different goals for self-actualization (i.e., Broaden Horizons vs. Discover the Unexplored) influences their reading intentions for news recommendations.</p

Reading news with a purpose:Explaining user profiles for self-actualization

Personalized content provided by recommender systems is an integral part of the current online news reading experience. However, news recommender systems are criticized for their 'black-box' approach to data collection and processing, and for their lack of explainability and transparency. This paper focuses on explaining user profiles constructed from aggregated reading behavior data, used to provide content-based recommendations. The paper makes a first step toward consolidating epistemic values of news providers and news readers. We present an evaluation of an explanation interface reflecting these values, and find that providing users with different goals for self-actualization (i.e., Broaden Horizons vs. Discover the Unexplored) influences their reading intentions for news recommendations

Implementation and In Situ Assessment of Contextual Privacy Policies

Online services collect an increasing amount of data about their users. Privacy policies are currently the only common way to inform users about the kinds of data collected, stored and processed by online services. Previous work showed that users do not read and understand privacy policies, due to their length, difficult language, and often non-prominent location. Embedding privacy-relevant information directly in the context of use could help users understand the privacy implications of using online services. We implemented Contextual Privacy Policies (CPPs) as a browser extension and provide it to the community to make privacy information accessible for end-users. We evaluated CPPs through a one-week deployment and in situ questionnaires as well as pre- and post-study interviews. We found that CPPs were well received by participants. The analysis revealed that provided information should be as compact as possible, be adjusted to user groups and enable users to take action