The volume of personal information, accessible online about individuals is unprecedented.Such information may be pieced together by others, to create a more detailed picture of a person, exposing them to potential harms, such as employment loss, unwanted attention, fraud, and more.In this context, relevance is contextual, situational and dependent, based on the risk it poses to the subject.In this paper, we explore this risk-based notion of relevance with the following questions in mind: How well can individuals identify and judge risks associated with online personal information?And, to what extent does this change individuals' awareness of their own information-sharing practices?In a user study, 243 participants were tasked with browsing fabricated online profiles to identify potential "risky" posts in one of two scenarios regarding either Identity Theft or Reputational Damage.On average, 72.2% of participants identified at least one risky post.However, only 23.7% identified dependent posts that taken together substantially increased the risk of identity theft or reputational damage.Further, participants reported greater awareness of potential risks that could arise from their own, and/or their friends' information sharing practices.Our findings suggest that when relevance is dependent on combining separate pieces of information to reveal risk, participants struggle to identify these cumulative revelations.Moreover, our study highlights that when participants perform tasks that feature personal information, it can lead to positive and negative experiences; changing their perceptions and increasing awareness about their own information behaviours while also raising concerns around their routine online practices.

The paper argues that protecting post-mortem privacy is not solely beneficial for the deceased and their relatives but enables intergenerational data-sharing. However, legal approaches alone are unlikely to generate the trust required and need to be supplemented with tools that assist data subjects in controlling what data they risk sharing more efficiently and, which they prefer to delete. Using the example of Dickens' “Bonfire of letters” as an example, we argue that the main challenge for law and digital technology is the cumulative risk of data breadcrumbs, which are likely to be individually harmless. Based on research within the EPSRC project “Cumulative Revelations of Personal Data”, we discuss how our findings indicate possible avenues to assist in more efficient intergenerational data sharing.

We present StyleBabel, a unique open access dataset of natural language captions and free-form tags describing the artistic style of over 135K digital artworks, collected via a novel participatory method from experts studying at specialist art and design schools. StyleBabel was collected via an iterative method, inspired by ‘Grounded Theory’: a qualitative approach that enables annotation while co-evolving a shared language for fine-grained artistic style attribute description. We demonstrate several downstream tasks for StyleBabel, adapting the recent ALADIN architecture for fine-grained style similarity, to train cross-modal embeddings for: 1) free-form tag generation; 2) natural language description of artistic style; 3) fine-grained text search of style. To do so, we extend ALADIN with recent advances in Visual Transformer (ViT) and cross-modal representation learning, achieving a state of the art accuracy in fine-grained style retrieval.

Searching for people online is a common search task that most of us have performed at some point or other. With so much information about people available online it is often amazing what one can find out about someone else -- especially when information taken from different sources is pieced together to create a more detailed picture of the individual, and then used to make inferences about them (leading to cumulative revelations ). As such, the relevance of one piece of information is often conditional and dependent on other pieces of information found. This creates interesting and novel challenges in evaluating informationrelevance when searching personal profiles, posts and related information about an individual, as well as the potential risks that can arise from such revelations. In this demonstration paper, we present a tool designed to investigate how people assess and judge the relevance and potential risks ofsmall, apparently innocuous pieces of information associated with fictitious personas, such as Taylor Addison, when searching and browsing online profiles and social media. The demonstrator also comprises a cyber-safety tool, which aims to provide education and raise awareness of the potential risks of cumulative revelations. It does so by engaging participants in different scenarios where the relevance of individual information items depends on the searcher and their particular underlying motivation.

When pieces from an individual's personal information available online are connected over time and across multiple platforms, this more complete digital trace can give unintended insights into their life and opinions. In a data narrative interview study with 26 currently employed participants, we examined risks and harms to individuals and employers when others joined the dots between their online information. We discuss the themes of visibility and self-disclosure, unintentional information leakage and digital privacy literacies constructed from our analysis. We contribute insights not only into people's difficulties in recalling and conceptualising their digital traces but of subsequently envisioning how their online information may be combined, or (re)identified across their traces and address a current gap in research by showing that awareness is lacking around the potential for personal information to be correlated by and made coherent to/by others, posing risks to individuals, employers, and even the state. We touch on inequalities of privacy, freedom and legitimacy that exist for different groups with regard to what they make (or feel compelled to make) available online and we contribute to current methodological work on the use of sketching to support visual sense making in data narrative interviews. We conclude by discussing the need for interventions that support personal reflection on the potential visibility of combined digital traces to spotlight hidden vulnerabilities, and promote more proactive action about what is shared and not shared online.

We present a novel de-centralised service for proving the provenance of online digital identity, exposed as an assistive tool to help non-expert users make better decisions about whom to trust online. Our service harnesses the digital personhood (DP); the longitudinal and multi-modal signals created through users’ lifelong digital interactions, as a basis for evidencing the provenance of identity. We describe how users may exchange trust evidence derived from their DP, in a granular and privacy-preserving manner, with other users in order to demonstrate coherence and longevity in their behaviour online. This is enabled through a novel secure infrastructure combining hybrid on- and off-chain storage combined with deep learning for DP analytics and visualization. We show how our tools enable users to make more effective decisions on whether to trust unknown third parties online, and also to spot behavioural deviations in their own social media footprints indicative of account hijacking.

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

HCI is increasingly working with 'vulnerable' people, yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops, participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime, they simultaneously rejected being identified as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people's ambivalent identities and contribute insights into how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguously designed texts alongside conventional outcomes, we 'trouble' our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI.

In this paper we report our study involving an early prototype of TAPESTRY, a service to support people and businesses to connect safely online through the use of a Machine Learning generated visualization. Establishing the veracity of the person or business behind a pseudonomized identity, online, is a challenge for many people. In the burgeoning digital economy, finding ways to support good decision-making in potentially risky online exchanges is of vital importance. In this paper, we propose a Machine Learning method to extract temporal patterns from data on individuals' behavioral norms in their online activity. This monitors and communicates the coherence of these activities to others, especially those who are about to disclose personal information to the individual, in a visualization. We report findings from a user trial that examined how people accessed and interpreted the TAPESTRY visualization to inform their decisions on who to back in a mock crowdfunding campaign to evaluate its efficacy. The study proved the protocol of the Machine Learning method and qualitative insights are informing iterations of the visualization design to enhance user experience and support understanding.

The development of platforms for community decision-making has been of growing interest to the HCI community, yet the ways technology might be woven into traditional consultation processes has been under-studied. We conducted fieldwork at consultation events where residents were invited to discuss and map assets related to their neighbourhoods to inform community decision-making. The fieldwork highlighted problems with equality, turn taking, the evidencing and elaborating on opinions by residents, and challenges related to capturing and documenting the events. We developed Community Conversational-a hybrid table-top game and digital capture and review platform-in response to these issues. Community Conversational was designed to provide a flexible structure to consultation events related to 'place', and support the production, capture and review of deliberative 'talk' to support decision-making. We study how the platform was used in two consultation events, and discuss the implications of capturing and evidencing local people's opinions for the accountability of decision-makers and community organisations.

Crowdfunding enables groups to self-fund the changes they want to make in the world. In other words, digital financial platforms are proving capable of supporting new relations between groups of people as well as offering new ways to organize money. Taking an HCI lens, we look at how some crowdfunding platform owners are approaching social innovation, not only at the level of supporting individual community initiatives, but at the broader level of using their platform to change societal behavior. Through four case studies, we show how crowdfunding has been chosen as a tool to redesign society by promoting environmental or social sustainability. We argue that the groups constituted through these interactions are not merely "crowds", but deliberate constellations built round a thing of interest (or "paying publics"). Our interviews with managers and owners explore how interactions with and around platforms work to achieve these ends and we conclude with design considerations.

With the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies.

The paper reflects on three approaches to the dissemination and display of digital art. \'1c"s[edition]\'1d" is a novel, web-based service that offers limited editions of "\'1cdigital prints"\'1d. Analysis of user comments suggests that the metaphor of a \'1c"limited digital edition"\'1d raises issues and to some extent is resisted. The second approach is the Flickr Brushes Gallery, where digital painters post images and comment on one another's work. Analysis of comment boards indicates that the shared art and comments are a form of gift exchange. Finally, the paper discusses a field study in which artists exhibited their work as it develops over time in digital frames and also in an immersive digital projection room. Analysis of field notes and interviews indicate that the digital frame approach was unsuccessful because of aesthetic and environmental concerns. The immersive projection suggested that more experiential approaches may be more interesting. It is argued that there is an inherent resistance in digital media to previous models of art commoditization. None of the approaches discussed here resolve the dilemma but rather indicate the scope and complexity of the issues.

The paper reports on the growing phenomena of art-making on mobile devices and contributes findings from two studies of artists' responses to iPad painting apps: the first is a series of exploratory workshops where artists were recruited to engage with a range of art apps, the second is a series of in-depth interviews with two artists who had incorporated the device and Brushes app into their painting practice over a period of months and years. The artists in both studies generally agreed that the devices and apps were easy to use and enjoyable but remained ambivalent about the technologies and outcomes. Although there was excitement around new creative possibilities there were also tensions around the status of the work being produced. The paper reflects on the role of popular digital production apparatus and information exchange on the constitution of artist-identities at a time of rapid techno-cultural change. It argues that while tablet computing and art apps have democratized certain artistic processes these technologies have generated conflict with traditional conceptions of art and curation.