Providing educational services to students with disabilities requires a unique combination of professional knowledge, and adherence to complex compliance and auditing goals. This study investigates the information access gaps within special education health services. Through think-aloud activities with therapy supervisors, practitioners, and administrative staff, we elicited explicit and implicit information needs, and identified significant challenges in current information seeking and documentation practices in this highly regulated environment. Thematic analysis of 329 coded segments (including 120 task descriptions, 123 pain points, and 86 desired features) reveals systematic mismatches between information capture and retrieval practices, which practitioners navigate daily, highlighting a necessity for information seeking beyond traditional search and demonstrating use cases for AI-augmented information retrieval. We present design implications, developed in collaboration with these stakeholders, focused on enhancing task documentation and designing interaction to support these needs, offering a roadmap for future information interaction systems in this complex, multi-stakeholder domain.

Understanding how social interactions affect privacy management is important in today’s digital landscape. We are investigating collective management of privacy and security through a mobile application, CO-oPS, that allows people to view and discuss each other’s app privacy settings within a community of users. Sixteen small, self-organized groups, totaling 81 participants, used the app over a four-week period. Data collection included pre- and post-study surveys measuring privacy perceptions (Community Belonging, Self-Efficacy, Community Collective Efficacy) along with in-app behavioral logs (messaging and viewing activity). In this paper, we present a social network analysis of our field study data, exploring the effects of group formation and engagement on building privacy and security efficacy through CO-oPS interactions. Our analysis reveals that while privacy perceptions were not initially homophilous, they grew more similar over time. Notably, proactively messaging others in the app enhanced personal privacy management confidence. Our results demonstrate the nuanced ways that groups can influence each other in addressing security and privacy needs.

We conducted a 4-week field study with 101 smartphone users who self-organized into 22 small groups of family, friends, and neighbors to use "CO-oPS," a mobile app for co-managing mobile privacy and security. We differentiated between those who provided oversight (i.e., caregivers) and those who did not (i.e., caregivees) to examine differential effects on their experiences and behaviors while using CO-oPS. Caregivers reported higher power use, community trust, belonging, collective efficacy, and self-efficacy than caregivees. Both groups' self-efficacy and collective efficacy for mobile privacy and security increased after using CO-oPS. However, this increase was significantly stronger for caregivees. Our research demonstrates how community-based approaches can benefit people who need additional help managing their digital privacy and security. We provide recommendations to support community-based oversight for managing privacy and security within communities of different roles and skills.

We conducted 26 co-design interviews with 50 smarthome device owners to understand the perceived benefits, drawbacks, and design considerations for developing a smarthome system that facilitates co-monitoring with emergency contacts who live outside of one’s home. Participants felt that such a system would help ensure their personal safety, safeguard from material loss, and give them peace of mind by ensuring quick response and verifying potential threats. However, they also expressed concerns regarding privacy, overburdening others, and other potential threats, such as unauthorized access and security breaches. To alleviate these concerns, participants designed flexible and granular access control and fail-safe back-up features. Our study reveals why peer-based co-monitoring of smarthomes for emergencies may be beneficial but also difficult to implement. Based on the insights gained from our study, we provide recommendations for designing technologies that facilitate such co-monitoring while mitigating its risks.

Our research aims to highlight and alleviate the complex tensions around online safety, privacy, and smartphone usage in families so that parents and teens can work together to better manage mobile privacy and security-related risks. We developed a mobile application ("app") for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") and had parents and teens assess whether it would be applicable for use with their families. CO-oPS is an Android app that allows a group of users to co-monitor the apps installed on one another's devices and the privacy permissions granted to those apps. We conducted a study with 19 parent-teen (ages 13-17) pairs to understand how they currently managed mobile safety and app privacy within their family and then had them install, use, and evaluate the CO-oPS app. We found that both parents and teens gave little consideration to online safety and privacy before installing new apps or granting privacy permissions. When using CO-oPS, participants liked how the app increased transparency into one another's devices in a way that facilitated communication, but were less inclined to use features for in-app messaging or to hide apps from one another. Key themes related to power imbalances between parents and teens surfaced that made co-management challenging. Parents were more open to collaborative oversight than teens, who felt that it was not their place to monitor their parents, even though both often believed parents lacked the technological expertise to monitor themselves. Our study sheds light on why collaborative practices for managing online safety and privacy within families may be beneficial but also quite difficult to implement in practice. We provide recommendations for overcoming these challenges based on the insights gained from our study.

Managing digital privacy and security is often a collaborative process, where groups of individuals work together to share information and give one another advice. Yet, this collaborative process is not always reciprocal or equally shared. In many cases, individuals with more expertise help others without receiving help in return. Therefore, we studied the phenomenon of "Tech Caregiving" by surveying 20 groups (112 individuals) comprised of friends, family members, and/or co-workers who identified at least one member of their group as a someone who provides informal technical support to the people they know. We found that tech caregivers reported significantly higher levels of power use and self-efficacy for digital privacy and security, compared to tech caregivees. However, caregivers and caregivees did not differ based on their self-reportedcommunity collective-efficacy for collaboratively managing privacy and security together as a group. This finding demonstrates the importance of tech caregiving and community belonging in building community collective efficacy for digital privacy and security. We also found that caregivers and caregivees most often communicated via text message or phone when coordinating support, which was most frequently needed when troubleshooting or setting up new devices. Meanwhile, discussions specific to privacy and security represented only a small fraction of the issues for which participants gave or received tech care. Thus, we conclude that educating tech caregivers on how to provide privacy and security-focused support, as well as designing technologies that facilitate such support, has the potential to create positive networks effects towards the collective management of digital privacy and security.

As smart devices are becoming commonplace in homes, we need to explore the needs of not just the residents of the home, but also of secondary stakeholders who may be granted access to these devices from outside of the home. We conducted a mixed methods study, which included a survey of 163 smart home device owners and a follow-up interview with 13 individuals who currently share their smart home devices with others outside of their home. Nearly half (47.8%) of our survey participants shared at least one smart home device with someone that did not live with them. Individuals sought greater safety and security by providing remote access to trusted family members or friends. By understanding users' perspectives about privacy and trust in relation to sharing smart home devices beyond the home, we build a case for community-based access control of smart home devices in the Internet of Things.

Older adults are increasingly becoming adopters of digital technologies, such as smartphones; however, this population remains particularly vulnerable to digital privacy and security threats. To date, most research on technology used among older adults focuses on helping individuals overcome their discomfort or lack of expertise with technology to protect them from such threats. Instead, we are interested in how communities of older adults work together to collectively manage their digital privacy and security. To do this, we surveyed 67 individuals across two older adult communities (59 older adults and eight employees or volunteers) and found that the community's collective efficacy for privacy and security was significantly correlated with the individuals' self-efficacy, power usage of technology, and their sense of community belonging. Community collective efficacy is a group's mutual belief in its ability to achieve a shared goal. Using social network analysis, we further unpacked these relationships to show that many older adults interact with others who have similar technological expertise, and closer-knit older adult communities that have low technology expertise (i.e., low power usage and self-efficacy) may increase their community collective efficacy for privacy and security by embedding facilitators (e.g., employees or volunteers) who have more technical expertise within their communities. Our work demonstrates how both peer influence and outside expertise can be leveraged to support older adults in managing their digital privacy and security.

Collective feedback can support an individual's decision-making process. For instance, individuals often seek the advice of friends, family, and co-workers to help them make privacy decisions. However, current technologies often do not provide mechanisms for this type of collaborative interaction. To address this gap, we propose a novel model of Community Oversight for Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS"), which identifies mechanisms for users to interact with people they trust to help one another make digital privacy and security decisions. We apply our CO-oPS model in the context of mobile applications ("apps"). To interrogate and refine this model, we conducted participatory design sessions with 32 participants in small groups of 2-4 people who know one another, with the goal of designing a mobile app that facilitates collaborative privacy and security decision-making. We describe and reflect on the opportunities and challenges that arise from the unequal motivation and trust in seeking support and giving support within and beyond a community. Through this research, we contribute a novel framework for collaborative digital privacy and security decision-making and provide empirical evidence towards how researchers and designers might translate this framework into design-based features.

Recently, curation practices start to develop in GitHub, where developers systematically put efforts to select, evaluate, and organize existing artifacts for the purposes of preservation and future use in software development. Curation practices in social media sites, such as Twitter and Pinterest, have been investigated, raising questions about the nature of collaborative curation in a professional/product-oriented site. In this study, we identify and characterize curation projects hosted on GitHub, and compare curation projects with software projects to study how this practice takes place and how it is different from the original use of GitHub. We find that curation has emerged as a highly popular category of GitHub project, which is directed to learning and professional development, and curation practice leverages collaborative tools and practices native to GitHub. Although curation projects and software projects use the same set of activities for development, they are different from each other in terms of the quantity of each type of activity performed by developers.