Post-Roe, people capable of pregnancy face fragmented reproductive privacy landscapes in the United States (U.S.), with risks spanning legal, digital, and interpersonal domains. These conditions demand new forms of privacy guidance. We analyzed 212 reproductive health zines— a DIY, subversive, and collectively produced media genre—to understand how they communicate reproductive health information. Zines foreground embodied, first-person narratives interwoven with historical context, medical guidance, and activist messaging. We argue their use of subversive or alternative medical knowledge enhanced credibility in contexts of low institutional trust. While some zines offer digital privacy strategies, many focus on avoiding institutional exposure altogether. These emotionally resonant, context-sensitive accounts illustrate threat models attuned to entangled risks of interpersonal betrayal, legal precarity, and surveillance. We conclude with design implications for how zines might better support people navigating reproductive risk through what we call narrative threat modeling—a situated practice that communicates privacy strategies through story, tone, and form rather than technical instructions or prescriptive checklists.

The introduction of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been met with a mix of reactions by higher education institutions, ranging from consternation and resistance to whole-hearted acceptance. Previous work has looked at the discourse and policies adopted by universities across the U.S. as well as educators, along with the inclusion of GenAI-related content and topics in higher education. Building on previous research, this study reports findings from a survey of engineering educators on their use of and perspectives toward generative AI. Specifically, we surveyed 98 educators from engineering, computer science, and education who participated in a workshop on GenAI in Engineering Education to learn about their perspectives on using these tools for teaching and research. We asked them about their use of and comfort with GenAI, their overall perspectives on GenAI, the challenges and potential harms of using it for teaching, learning, and research, and examined whether their approach to using and integrating GenAI in their classroom influenced their experiences with GenAI and perceptions of it. Consistent with other research in GenAI education, we found that while the majority of participants were somewhat familiar with GenAI, reported use varied considerably. We found that educators harbored mostly hopeful and positive views about the potential of GenAI. We also found that those who engaged more with their students on the topic of GenAI, both as communi-cators (those who spoke directly with their students) and as incorporators (those who included it in their syllabus), tend to be more positive about its contribution to learning, while also being more attuned to its potential abuses. These findings suggest that integrating and engaging with generative AI is essential to foster productive interactions between instructors and students around this technology. Our work ultimately contributes to the evolving discourse on GenAI use, integration, and avoidance within educational settings. Through exploratory quantitative research, we have identified specific areas for further investigation.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson exposed and exacerbated existing gaps in reproductive privacy. In the post-Roe era, aggressive surveillance by both government and private entities has made real and heightened concerns about privacy violations for people capable of pregnancy (PCOP). We investigate PCOPs' reproductive privacy concerns and the strategies they use to address these concerns post-Roe. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 adult cisgender women and transgender men in the U.S. Our findings show that for PCOPs, privacy risks are both persistent and anomalous, imposing what we conceptualize as reproductive privacy labor , a type of safety and data work that is, to them, both necessary and exhausting. We introduce the conceptual framework Sociotechnical Reproductive Privacy , outlining the relationships between actors, technologies, and identities that are implicated in the many contexts of reproductive privacy vulnerabilities post-Roe. We conclude with considerations for research and design, and explore the utility of approaches like refusal and regulation (e.g., technical, policy) in promoting sociotechnical reproductive privacy. This research underscores the urgent need to address the intersection of reproductive rights, privacy, and technology, offering insights into how affected individuals navigate and manage their reproductive health decisions in an increasingly surveilled sociotechnical landscape.

Researchers of online safety for older couples where at least one partner has cognitive impairment have posited the need for more flexible and adaptive online safeguard options and systems that support shared decision-making practices to maintain autonomy. We designed a safety option probe that embodies these two design requirements and then observed the practices of such couples when engaged in collaborative online safety discussions and decision-making. Focusing on conversational roles and dynamics, we found that their navigation of safety options was often grounded in relationship histories and broader sociotechnical dynamics that long predate their cognitive issues. In addition, while the process still remained highly collaborative, it was not marked by equitable turn-taking as has been considered the hallmark of shared decision-making. We argue that future shared online safety systems for older couples with memory concerns should not focus on equitable discussion and explicit agreement as has been previously recommended and instead support mutual exploration and negotiation of safety setting choices.

The landscape of digital privacy risks faced by individuals seeking abortions has grown increasingly complex following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Reproductive healthcare providers are uniquely positioned to offer critical privacy guidance. We conducted interviews with 22 reproductive healthcare providers across the U.S. to explore their perceptions of privacy threats for abortion-seeking patients and the types of guidance they provide. Our findings show that providers are most concerned about privacy risks for vulnerable patients—minors, individuals seeking gender-affirming care, and those in abusive relationships—particularly regarding information that could be intercepted by people close to them, such as partners or relatives. However, providers generally do not perceive government surveillance or hostile actors as major threats to abortion-seeking patients. We conclude with an updated notion of informed consent and preliminary recommendations for ways healthcare providers can revise their threat models to better support the privacy of abortion-seeking patients.

Security measures like identity verification are extensively implemented and seamlessly integrated into daily life. However, these systems are often not designed to accommodate the needs of neurodivergent individuals, leading to potential accessibility and reliability challenges. Neurodiverse populations exhibit differences in cognitive abilities, behavior, and learning processes, including difficulties with memory and attention. These obstacles prevent users from recalling information or accessing instructions. Furthermore, neurodivergent individuals are more prone to exhibit differences in eye gaze, keystroke dynamics, or speech patterns than neurotypical populations. Individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions often exhibit cognitive and sensory differences that can render traditional identity verification systems less effective. This demographic disparity can increase susceptibility to cyberattacks, underscoring the urgent need for further research. The proposed study highlights these disparities and urges the community to explore strategies to improve fairness and effectiveness in such systems. This paper emphasizes the importance of modifying user identity confirmation technologies to suit better neurodiverse populations and advocates for developing more inclusive and accessible systems. It is crucial to ensure that security technologies, such as biometrics, are inclusive and effective for all users, including neurodivergent users. The proposed research promotes equal access and ethical practices in verifying digital identity.

It has always been challenging for teens to access consistent and reliable information about their reproductive health. But we know little about the impact of recent changes to laws governing sex education and the right to abortion on teen reproductive health information seeking and sharing. We conducted interviews with 15 teens, finding that, post-Roe, teens are concerned about risks to their reproductive health data, particularly as it relates to what they search and share on social media and period tracking apps. Different assessments of risk related to sexual activity, state laws, social context, and cultural and family values dictate information practices. But social risk (like being harassed or doxxed) is the biggest driver of information seeking and sharing practices among mostly non-sexually active teens. We describe the complexities of teens navigating reproductive health post-Roe and offer some guidance about teen technology and privacy literacy.

Social media apps present personalized content to users. Such content is often described as “for you,” raising questions about the relationship between users’ sense of “self” and the “you” that is represented. Answering such questions is pressing in the case of teen users whose identities are still forming. Thus we ask, “What do teens think about the relationship between personalized content and their sense of self?” We interviewed teens aged 13 to 17 (n = 15) about their experiences with personalized content on social media. Participants so routinely saw themselves accurately reflected in personalized content that they noted the occasional inaccuracy with surprise, while simply scrolling past it. Our findings point to: the normalization of data doubles in the form of personalized content; and teens’ indifference to inaccuracies presented by such data doubles.

Older adults face unique risks in trying to secure their online activities. They are not only the frequent targets of scams and fraud; they are the targets of a barrage of cybersafety communiqués whose impact is unclear. AARP, the United States advocacy group focusing on issues facing older adults over the age of 50, is among those educators whose strategies remain underexplored, yet their reach makes it imperative that we understand what they are saying, to whom, and to what effect. Drawing on an analysis of AARP publications about cybersafety and privacy, we sought to better understand their discourse on the topic. We report on findings that AARP's language may have the effect of portraying bad actors ("fraudsters") as individuals, rather than enterprises, which at the target end, personalizes interactions, placing too much onus on individual users to assess and deflect threats. AARP's positioning of, and guidance about, threats may sometimes prompt a thought process that puts users at the center of the narrative and may encourage engagement. Instructing older Americans, or anyone, on the forensics of cyber-sleuthing is enormously difficult. We conclude with a discussion of different approaches to cybersafety, one that involves educating older adults about the rudiments of surveillance capitalism.

This qualitative study examines the privacy challenges perceived by librarians who afford access to physical and electronic spaces and are in a unique position of safeguarding the privacy of their patrons. As internet “service providers,” librarians represent a bridge between the physical and internet world, and thus offer a unique sight line to the convergence of privacy, identity, and social disadvantage. Drawing on interviews with 16 librarians, we describe how they often interpret or define their own rules when it comes to privacy to protect patrons who face challenges that stem from structures of inequality outside their walls. We adopt the term “intersectional thinking” to describe how librarians reported thinking about privacy solutions, which is focused on identity and threats of structural discrimination (the rules, norms, and other determinants of discrimination embedded in institutions and other societal structures that present barriers to certain groups or individuals), and we examine the role that low/no-tech strategies play in ameliorating these threats. We then discuss how librarians act as "privacy intermediaries" for patrons, the potential analogue for this role for developers of systems, the power of low/no-tech strategies, and implications for design and research of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs).

Now that the protections of Roe v. Wade are no longer available throughout the United States, the free flow of personal data can be used by legal authorities to provide evidence of felony. However, we know little about how impacted individuals approach their reproductive privacy in this new landscape. We conducted interviews with 15 individuals who may get/were pregnant to address this gap. While nearly all reported deleting period tracking apps, they were not willing to go much further, even while acknowledging the risks of generating data. Quite a few considered a more inhospitable, Handmaid's Tale like climate in which their medical history and movements would put them in legal peril but felt that, by definition, this reality was insuperable, and also that they were not the target—the notion that privileged location, stage of life did not make them the focus of government or vigilante efforts. We also found that certain individuals (often younger and/or with reproductive risks) were more attuned to the need to modify their technology or equipped to employ high and low-tech strategies. Using an intersectional lens, we discuss implications for media advocacy and propose privacy intermediation to frame our thinking about reproductive privacy.

We studied the impact of introducing first-year computer science (CS) students to ethical thinking about the social justice impacts of data collection, tracking, bias, internet privacy, and competitive “real world” system design and critique activities. While basic content was consistent for all, one group was involved throughout the course in peer discussions designed to foster greater engagement, with the anticipation that this would enable students to reach new levels of sensitivity through peer-to-peer interaction. This article reports on our observation of this design, interview, and project data collected throughout the course as well interviews conducted eight months later to learn about how students were retaining and applying what they learned. We found that students are sensitive to the technology-related risks and vulnerabilities encountered by individuals based on race, gender, and, to some extent, age, but they struggle to assess who is responsible for these risks, what to do about bias in technology design, and how to mitigate harms for individuals whom they perceive to be vulnerable, furthering the argument for an integrated ethics curriculum. We explore the value of formal peer-led discussion to evolve social justice thinking with a focus on identity, though note that opportunities for any group discussion are meaningful to students’ thinking about social justice. Over the longer term, students tend to recall and apply ethics that is closely related to their identity, suggesting that empathy has limits.

The sex industry exists on a continuum based on the degree of work autonomy present in one's labor conditions: a high degree of autonomy exists on one side of the continuum where certain independent sex workers have a great deal of agency, while much less autonomy exists on the other side, where sex is traded under conditions of human trafficking. Various organizations across North America perform outreach to sex workers to offer assistance in the form of services (e.g., healthcare, financial assistance, housing) as well as prayer and intervention. Increasingly, technology is used to look for trafficking victims and/or facilitate the provision of assistance or services, for example through scraping and parsing sex industry workers' advertisements into a database of contact information that can be used by outreach organizations. However, little is known about the efficacy of anti-trafficking outreach technology, nor the potential risks of using such technology to identify and contact the highly stigmatized and marginalized population of those working in the sex industry. In this work, we investigate the use, context, benefits, and harms of an anti-trafficking technology platform via qualitative interviews with multiple stakeholders: the technology developers (n=6), organizations that use the technology (n=17), and sex industry workers who have been contacted or wish to be contacted (n=24). Our findings illustrate misalignment between developers, users of the platform, and sex industry workers they are attempting to assist. In their current state, anti-trafficking outreach tools such as the one we investigate are ineffective and, at best, serve as a mechanism for spam and, at worst, scale and exacerbate harm against the population they aim to serve. We conclude with a discussion of best practices -- and the feasibility of their implementation -- for technology-facilitated outreach efforts to minimize risk or harm to sex industry workers while efficiently providing needed services.

Designing technologies that support the mutual cybersecurity and autonomy of older adults facing cognitive challenges requires close collaboration of partners. As part of research to design a Safety Setting application for older adults with memory loss or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), we use a scenario-based participatory design. Our study builds on previous findings that couples’ approach to memory loss was characterized by a desire for flexibility and choice, and an embrace of role uncertainty. We find that couples don't want a system that fundamentally alters their relationship and are looking to maximize self-surveillance competence and minimize loss of autonomy for their partners. All desire Safety Settings to maintain their mutual safety rather than designating one partner as the target of oversight. Couples are open to more rigorous surveillance if they have control over what types of activities trigger various levels of oversight.

Social media companies wield power over their users through design, policy, and through their participation in public discourse. We set out to understand how companies leverage public relations to influence expectations of privacy and privacy-related norms. To interrogate the discourse productions of companies in relation to privacy, we examine the blogs associated with three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram (both owned by Facebook Inc.), and Snapchat. We analyze privacy-related posts using critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how these powerful entities construct narratives about users and their privacy expectations. We find that each of these platforms often make use of discourse about "vulnerable" identities to invoke relations of power, while at the same time, advancing interpretations and values that favor data capitalism. Finally, we discuss how these public narratives might influence the construction of users' own interpretations of appropriate privacy norms and conceptions of self. We contend that expectations of privacy and social norms are not simply artifacts of users' own needs and desires, but co-constructions that reflect the influence of social media companies themselves.

Designing technologies that support the cybersecurity of older adults with memory concerns involves wrestling with an uncomfortable paradox between surveillance and independence and the close collaboration of couples. This research captures the interactions between older adult couples where one or both have memory concerns—a primary feature of cognitive decline—as they make decisions on how to safeguard their online activities using a Safety Setting probe we designed, and over the course of several informal interviews and a diary study. Throughout, couples demonstrated a collaborative mentality to which we apply a frame of citizenship in opensource collaboration, specifically (a) histories of participation , (b) lower barriers to participation, and (c) maintaining ongoing contribution. In this metaphor of collaborative enterprise, one partner (or member of the couple) may be the service provider and the other may be the participant, but at varying moments, they may switch roles while still maintaining a collaborative focus on preserving shared assets and freedom on the internet. We conclude with a discussion of what this service provider-contributor mentality means for empowerment through citizenship, and implications for vulnerable populations’ cybersecurity.

Privacy and surveillance are central features of public discourse around use of computing systems. As the systems we design and study are increasingly used and regulated as potential instruments of surveillance, HCI researchers-even those whose focus is not privacy-find themselves needing to understand privacy in their work. Concepts like contextual integrity and boundary regulation have become touchstones for thinking about privacy in HCI. In this paper, we draw on HCI and privacy literature to understand the limitations of commonly used theories and examine their assumptions, politics, strengths, and weaknesses. We use a case study from the HCI literature to illustrate conceptual gaps in existing frameworks where privacy requirements can fall through. Finally, we advocate vulnerability as a core concept for privacy theorizing and examine how feminist, queer-Marxist, and intersectional thinking may augment our existing repertoire of privacy theories to create a more inclusive scholarship and design practice.

A growing body of research suggests that intimate partner abusers use digital technologies to surveil their partners, including by installing spyware apps, compromising devices and online accounts, and employing social engineering tactics. However, to date, this form of privacy violation, called intimate partner surveillance (IPS), has primarily been studied from the perspective of victim-survivors. We present a qualitative study of how potential perpetrators of IPS harness the emotive power of sharing personal narratives to validate and legitimise their abusive behaviours. We analysed 556 stories of IPS posted on publicly accessible online forums dedicated to the discussion of sexual infidelity. We found that many users share narrative posts describing IPS as they boast about their actions, advise others on how to perform IPS without detection, and seek suggestions for next steps to take. We identify a set of common thematic story structures, justifications for abuse, and outcomes within the stories that provide a window into how these individuals believe their behaviour to be justified. Using these stories, we develop a four-stage framework that captures the change in a potential perpetrator's approach to IPS. We use our findings and framework to guide a discussion of efforts to combat abuse, including how we can identify crucial moments where interventions might be safely applied to prevent or deescalate IPS.

Recent literature has demonstrated the limited and, in some instances, waning role of ethical training in computing classes in the US. The capacity for artificial intelligence (AI) to be inequitable or harmful is well documented, yet it's an issue that continues to lack apparent urgency or effective mitigation. The question we raise in this paper is how to prepare future generations to recognize and grapple with the ethical concerns of a range of issues plaguing AI, particularly when they are combined with surveillance technologies in ways that have grave implications for social participation and restriction?from risk assessment and bail assignment in criminal justice, to public benefits distribution and access to housing and other critical resources that enable security and success within society. The US is a mecca of information and computer science (IS and CS) learning for Asian students whose experiences as minorities renders them familiar with, and vulnerable to, the societal bias that feeds AI bias. Our goal was to better understand how students who are being educated to design AI systems think about these issues, and in particular, their sensitivity to intersectional considerations that heighten risk for vulnerable groups. In this paper we report on findings from qualitative interviews with 20 graduate students, 11 from an AI class and 9 from a Data Mining class. We find that students are not predisposed to think deeply about the implications of AI design for the privacy and well-being of others unless explicitly encouraged to do so. When they do, their thinking is focused through the lens of personal identity and experience, but their reflections tend to center on bias, an intrinsic feature of design, rather than on fairness, an outcome that requires them to imagine the consequences of AI. While they are, in fact, equipped to think about fairness when prompted by discussion and by design exercises that explicitly invite consideration of intersectionality and structural inequalities, many need help to do this empathy 'work.' Notably, the students who more frequently reflect on intersectional problems related to bias and fairness are also more likely to consider the connection between model attributes and bias, and the interaction with context. Our findings suggest that experience with identity-based vulnerability promotes more analytically complex thinking about AI, lending further support to the argument that identity-related ethics should be integrated into IS and CS curriculums, rather than positioned as a stand-alone course.

Anonymity can enable both healthy online interactions like support-seeking and toxic behaviors like hate speech. How do online service providers balance these threats and opportunities? This two-part qualitative study examines the challenges perceived by open collaboration service providers in allowing anonymous contributions to their projects. We interviewed eleven people familiar with organizational decisions related to privacy and security at five open collaboration projects and followed up with an analysis of public discussions about anonymous contribution to Wikipedia. We contrast our findings with prior work on threats perceived by project volunteers and explore misalignment between policies aiming to serve contributors and the privacy practices of contributors themselves.

By choice or by necessity, some contributors to commons-based peer production sites use privacy-protecting services to remain anonymous. As anonymity seekers, users of the Tor network have been cast both as ill-intentioned vandals and as vulnerable populations concerned with their privacy. In this study, we use a dataset drawn from a corpus of Tor edits to Wikipedia to uncover the character of Tor users' contributions. We build in-depth narrative descriptions of Tor users' actions and conduct a thematic analysis that places their editing activity into seven broad groups. We find that although their use of a privacy-protecting service marks them as unusual within Wikipedia, the character of many Tor users' contributions is in line with the expectations and norms of Wikipedia. However, our themes point to several important places where lack of trust promotes disorder, and to contributions where risks to contributors, service providers, and communities are unaligned.

What does reliability mean for building a grounded theory? What about when writing an auto-ethnography? When is it appropriate to use measures like inter-rater reliability (IRR)? Reliability is a familiar concept in traditional scientific practice, but how, and even whether to establish reliability in qualitative research is an oft-debated question. For researchers in highly interdisciplinary fields like computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the question is particularly complex as collaborators bring diverse epistemologies and training to their research. In this article, we use two approaches to understand reliability in qualitative research. We first investigate and describe local norms in the CSCW and HCI literature, then we combine examples from these findings with guidelines from methods literature to help researchers answer questions like: "should I calculate IRR?" Drawing on a meta-analysis of a representative sample of CSCW and HCI papers from 2016-2018, we find that authors use a variety of approaches to communicate reliability; notably, IRR is rare, occurring in around 1/9 of qualitative papers. We reflect on current practices and propose guidelines for reporting on reliability in qualitative research using IRR as a central example of a form of agreement. The guidelines are designed to generate discussion and orient new CSCW and HCI scholars and reviewers to reliability in qualitative research.

Open-source software (OSS) is software whose source code is available to view, change, and distribute without cost, and is typically developed in a collaborative manner that has captured the imagination of those who view the web as enabling more "democratic" models of governance. Researchers have, for years, debated the social structure of OSS projects -- in particular, the extent to which they represent decentralized forms of organization. Many have argued that the significant concentration of code development responsibility raises doubts about whether the level of power-sharing truly qualifies as "distributed" in the way early observers predicted. This research will investigate how changes in the technology that supports these projects -- specifically the greater visibility that characterizes the GitHub workspace may lead to a more broadly and quantifiably distributed leadership. Over the course of several studies employing several methodologies, it will examine leadership in OSS projects when visibility is a feature of the workspace.

Here we present findings of a needs validation study of 18-25 year old women and their wardrobes. Based on their feedback, we developed a prototype system that allows for borrowing and sharing of information about clothing via Facebook. The novelty of our interface lies in its combining RFID tags and social networking. In doing so we bridge the material and virtual realms and demonstrate the importance of material culture for ubiquitous computing.