Social media platforms increasingly function as informal infrastructures to seek justice in contexts where formal justice systems are inaccessible or distrusted. We examine how Bangladeshi individuals leverage Facebook to disclose personal experiences of harm (e.g., sexual harassment, fraud, and abuse) and pursue justice. Our in-depth interviews with 18 participants unpacked the motivations, strategic choices, and sociotechnical risks involved in such disclosures. Our participants carefully navigated trade-offs between visibility, credibility, privacy, and legal vulnerability. Our findings contribute to HCI by (1) conceptualizing justice-seeking behaviors in low-trust, high-risk environments; (2) offering empirical insights into post-curation, audience targeting, and identity management; and (3) identifying design opportunities for safer, more equitable platform interactions. We present implications for platform governance and moderation, including features that support credibility, mitigate emotional harm, and enhance the legibility of justice claims. This work advances critical HCI and social computing perspectives on safety, care, and power in digital participation.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and large language models have created a new dynamic of student engagement beyond academic contexts. While prior research focused on AI’s role in providing academic and emotional support, less is known about the motivations to personalize AI, its diverse usage, and the intricate relationship between AI and the student population, especially in the context of the Global South. Our study fills this gap with findings drawn from 21 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in Bangladesh, revealing usage as companionship, intimate partnership, worldbuilding, reminiscence of dead family members, and prioritization of AI over human relationships. These findings shed light accounting the local cultural norms on shaping AI adoption in Bangladesh, highlighting both opportunities and risks, and provide essential insights to inform necessary guidelines. We further connect our findings to the broader issues in Human-AI interaction and offer future research directions.

Mobile broadband is the dominant mode of Internet access across the Global South, yet independent quality assessment remains fundamentally limited. Crowdsourced platforms capture only where motivated users run speed tests, while standard administrative aggregation collapses communities with vastly different connectivity realities into a single metric — together rendering marginalized communities invisible to measurement. We construct iQoE, a normalized broadband quality index derived from crowdsourced data, and show that measurement density correlates strongly with wealth while national progress narratives obscure deep spatial inequality. To reach communities iQoE cannot see, we propose a mixed-methods approach: a lightweight Android app paired with a diary study in Korail — Bangladesh's largest urban slum — triangulated against network planner interviews. We seek SIGCOMM community feedback on measurement design for underserved urban contexts in the Global South.

Cryptocurrency practices worldwide are seen as innovative, yet they navigate a fragmented regulatory landscape across different countries. Many national authorities aim to balance promoting innovation, safeguarding consumers, and managing potential threats. In particular, it is unclear how people deal with cryptocurrencies in the countries where trading or mining is prohibited. This insight is crucial in conveying the risk reduction strategies. To address this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 cryptocurrency traders and miners from Bangladesh, where the environment is hostile towards cryptocurrencies. Our research revealed that the participants use unique strategies to mitigate risks around cryptocurrencies. Our findings indicate a prevalent uncertainty at both personal and organizational levels concerning the interpretation of laws, a situation worsened by the actions of the major financial service providers who indirectly facilitate cryptocurrency transactions. We further connect our findings to the broader issues in HCI regarding folk models, informal market and legality, and education and awareness.

Informed by the previous HCI and CSCW scholarship on residual mobility -- a concept that transcends mere geographical relocation to encompass socio-cultural and communal disruptions -- this study probes the unique religious and spiritual challenges faced by the Hindu migrants from the Indian subcontinent in Canada. Through interviews with 20 participants, we investigate the role of technology in navigating a diverse religious landscape in professional environments, coping with changing religious materiality, and passing down traditions to the next generation. Our work identifies the community's proactive use of social media and videoconferencing for religious festivals and connection with their religious community. The findings raise several implications for CSCW research on supporting residual mobility experiences of the Hindu migrants, including effective organization of religious event information, virtual support for material aspects of religious rituals, and fostering online environments that enable pluralistic spiritual engagement.

The sex workers in the Global South represent a significant portion of the world sex industry. However, when compared to the relevant HCI literature on sex work and computing, there exists a noticeable gap in comprehending the experiences and circumstances of the sex workers in this region. This study fills the void by presenting the findings of a three-month-long ethnography with 25 legal sex workers in Daulatdia brothel, Bangladesh, revealing their struggles with stigma, low-tech literacy, and the emerging threats of online security, along with their skills and creativity to bypass those. Drawing on the previous literature on South Asian feminism, postcolonial computing, and critical urban studies, we demonstrate how these findings are deeply rooted in the country’s history and culture and propelled by a modernist vision of “development” that marginalizes such communities. Our discussion advances HCI’s discourse on sexuality, privacy, equity, and generates implications for design and policy changes.

In this paper, we study popular microcelebrities from the Global South to understand their strategies and practices on Facebook. Unlike traditional celebrities who gain their reputation through different types of physical performance, these microcelebrities attain their status by presenting themselves in a favorable way to their online followers. We conducted interviews with 19 microcelebrities from Bangladesh and analyzed our data using actor-network theory (ANT) and Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis (DA) of human interaction. We discuss the complex socio-technical ecosystem of the microcelebrity and the roles of non-human actors, such as platforms and local internet infrastructure along with human actors’ practices. We explain the microcelebrities’ experience with the process of microcelebritification–the process of being a microcelebrity on social media through impression management, and becoming opinion leaders in local sociopolitical discourses as part of their online identity. Our paper contributes to the emerging literature on microcelebrities by highlighting the process viewed in the context of the Global South.

In this work, we design and evaluate LociMotion, a training interface to learn a strong authentication secret in a single session. LociMotion automatically takes a random password with twelve lowercase letters (56-bit entropy) to generate the training interface. It first leverages users’ spatial and visual (declarative) memory by showing them a video clip based on the method of loci, and then consolidates the learning process by having them play a computer game that leverages their motor (procedural) memory. The results of a memorability study with 300 participants showed that LociMotion had a significantly higher recall success rate than a control condition. A second study with 200 participants demonstrated the effectiveness of LociMotion over a period of time (99%, 96%, and 81% recall success rates after 1, 4, and 18 days, respectively). LociMotion offers an alternative to the spaced repetition technique, as it does not require dozens of training sessions.

HCI has a dearth of knowledge in understanding how religiosity, spirituality, and ideological values and practices shape the notion of privacy and guide information practices worldwide. In this paper, we fill this gap by reporting our findings from an eight-month-long ethnographically informed study in Bangladeshi Islamic communities. We report how the Islamic spirit of purdah, amanah, gheebat, riya, and buhtan represent the notion of privacy and guide privacy practices among “pious” Bangladeshi Muslims. We further discuss how sacred values generate norms and customs associated with privacy and surveillance. Finally, we recommend how a nuanced understanding of divine interests, identity performance, family surveillance, and spatial privacy norms help designing for inclusive privacy in the Global South. This paper makes a novel contribution to HCI by providing a new analytical perspective to understand privacy and design privacy-preserving technologies and tools for regions where religiosity, spirituality, and sacred values play a dominant role.

A large number of mobile phone applications have been built and deployed to combat COVID-19, offering various services to users, including virus information, contact tracing, and symptom monitoring among others. At the same time, the privacy and security vulnerabilities of user data over these apps have become a big concern in many places. To examine this issue, we conducted a mixed-method study with a combined approach of app analysis and an online survey to understand the privacy vulnerabilities of such apps and get an overview of user perceptions around this issue. In addition, we considered the notion of privacy in two different socio-economic contexts (Global North and Global South) to specify similarities and differences in app-specific privacy functionalities (data practices, functional requirements, regulations, etc.) and identify factors that impacted users’ decision to use such apps (such as trust, preferences, concerns, motivations, etc.). Thus, this paper presents two diverse sets of opinions from these two geographic regions (including 27 countries), which provide a broader understanding of how the privacy concerns around COVID-19 are connected to various economic, political, and social factors. Furthermore, our analysis of 39 apps provides a deep insight into what many COVID-19 apps are lacking to ensure proper privacy practices and how those issues are entangled with various contextual challenges.

Most scholarly discussions around ridesharing applications center on the experiences of the drivers and the riders (passengers), and thus the role of the owners of the cars, if they are different from the drivers, remain understudied. However, in many countries in the Global South, the car owners are often different from the car drivers, and the tensions between them often shape the experience with these ridesharing apps in those countries. In this paper, we address this issue based on our interview-based study in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which incorporates semi-structured interviews of 31 Uber drivers and 10 car owners. From our interviews, we identify the contract models that facilitate the partnership between prospective Uber drivers without a car and car owners seeking to rent their cars for Uber, describe the tensions between these two parties, provide a nuanced cultural portrayal of their negotiation mechanisms, and highlight the reasons for which the driver or the owner leaves Uber. Our analysis reveals how the local adoption of sharing economy amplifies existing inequalities and disrupts the prevailing social dynamics. We also connect our findings to the broader interests of CSCW around work, privacy, power and discuss their implications for design and policy formulations.

To protect under-represented and marginalized workers from the upcoming automation boom, it is imperative to critically examine the past technological breakthroughs and their impacts on workers. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, computer-aided newspaper production technology gradually started becoming popular in Bangladesh, making the traditional hot metal typesetting technology obsolete. The typesetters, who relied on manual labor and a very basic level of literacy, experienced mass layoffs and had to adapt to new technology to survive in their profession. In this work, we interviewed 17 typesetters from that period to understand their technology adoption dynamics. Our findings reveal that despite a few success stories, most of the typesetters failed to adopt and gradually went into oblivion, mainly because of local infrastructural issues. We connect our findings to broader issues of culture, politics, and economics and provide concrete suggestions and policy recommendations to protect more than six million workers who are vulnerable to technology-induced job displacement in the next 20 years in Bangladesh.

This paper joins a growing body of work within ICTD and related fields studying the privacy challenges in the Global South. While most of the existing work in this area has focused on uses of technology in personal and home settings, a large part of computing in the Global South centers around public places, such as commercial Digital Service Centers (DSCs). In this paper, we present the findings from a six-month-long ethnography studying 19 Digital Service Centers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We find that infrastructural limitations, local power politics, lack of knowledge, and insufficient protection mechanisms lead to privacy vulnerabilities for the customers of these centers. We apply the lens of informal markets to analyze these vulnerabilities and connect our findings to the broader concerns of ICTD around development, ethics, and postcolonial computing and discuss potential design and policy implications around these issues.

This paper examines the philosophical aspects of cybersecurity through the lens of deconstruction, as proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. We offer deconstruction as an analytical orientation to better understand and challenge the very philosophical concepts a security system presupposes, arguing that not only are concrete systems necessarily insecure but that the concepts and structures through which their security is understood are also insecure. By centering our discourse on instability and contradictions, we demonstrate the relevance of deconstruction in cybersecurity through four concrete examples drawn from four different areas: digital rights management, cyberwar, software vulnerability, and user authentication. We further address the concept of ontological security to draw the boundaries between beneficial and detrimental uses of deconstruction. These insights complement other HCISec efforts to conceptualize cybersecurity as a holistic discipline that incorporates art and philosophy in addition to science and technology.

Strategies of hiding information over communication media have long been an interest of CSCW and related communities. Most of the studies in this area have focused on various computational means of data protection and their vulnerabilities, and occasionally on social practices situated in the West. However, communities in the Global South often have a rich trove of vernacular arts and crafts of hiding information that might be leveraged to design novel kinds of privacy-preserving technologies. In this paper, we present findings from our three-month long original ethnographic work with various communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh that reveal a wide range of culturally embedded techniques of hiding confidential and sensitive information from their 'others'. Our analysis demonstrates the dynamic nature of these techniques, the learning process associated with them, and their deep relationship with contextual politics that these communities are embedded in. We further connect our findings to the broader interests of CSCW around otherness, ethics, and democracy, and also discuss their implications for design.

Purpose Two-factor authentication is being implemented more broadly to improve security against phishing, shoulder surfing, keyloggers and password guessing attacks. Although passwords serve as the first authentication factor, a common approach to implementing the second factor is sending a one-time code, either via e-mail or text message. The prevalence of smartphones, however, creates security risks in which a stolen phone leads to user’s accounts being accessed. Physical tokens such as RSA’s SecurID create extra burdens for users and cannot be used on many accounts at once. This study aims to improve the usability and security for two-factor online authentication. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose a novel second authentication factor that, similar to passwords, is also based on something the user knows but operates similarly to a one-time code for security purposes. The authors design this component to provide higher security guarantee with minimal memory burden and does not require any additional communication channels or hardware. Motivated by psychology research, the authors leverage users’ autobiographical memory in a novel way to create a secure and memorable component for two-factor authentication. Findings In a multi-session lab study, all of the participants were able to log in successfully on the first attempt after a one-week delay from registration and reported satisfaction on the usability of the scheme. Originality/value The results indicate that the proposed approach to leverage autobiographical memory is a promising direction for further research on second authentication factor based on something the user knows.

Despite advances in biometrics and other technologies, passwords remain the most commonly used means of authentication in computer systems. Users maintain different security levels for different passwords. In this study, we examine the degree of similarity among passwords of different security levels of a user. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 80 students from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). We asked the subjects to construct new passwords for websites of different security levels. We collected the lower-level passwords (e.g., passwords for online news sites) constructed by the subjects, combined them with a comprehensive wordlist, and performed dictionary attacks on their constructed passwords from the higher-level sites (e.g., banking websites). We could successfully crack almost one-third of their constructed passwords from the higher-level sites with this method. This suggests that, if a user's lower-level password is leaked, it can be used effectively by an attacker to crack some of the user's higher-level passwords.