Teenagers regularly use social media to connect and share information with peers. While much existing research focuses on the adverse impacts of social media on teens’ privacy and well-being, little research has examined how teens’ privacy could be strengthened through participating in online peer communities. Through a qualitative analysis of conversations in two teen-oriented communities on Reddit and Discord, we explore how teens leverage storytelling and conversations with peers to unpack privacy dilemmas in their lives. Our findings highlight the potential of these online interactions to help teens cope with privacy violations, make sense of complex social matters, and nurture their sense of agency. We recommend platform design directions to explore the implications of collective sensemaking in peer-driven online contexts, and call for a broader conceptualization of youth privacy and research on privacy literacy.

The social media app BeReal positions itself as a space for meaningful connections, however, little is known about how the app's unique combination of ephemerality, informality, and improvisation actually supports relationship maintenance. We aimed to understand what role BeReal plays in young adults’ friendships and lives. Drawing on interviews with 31 young adults at a large university in the northeastern U.S., we find that users treated BeReal as a fun, low-effort space to share glimpses of everyday life with smaller networks of friends. BeReal helped users maintain relationships, especially with past or geographically distant friends but not necessarily deepen bonds with close friends. Users welcomed the app's minimalistic user experience but raised doubts about the platform's longevity. Based on our findings, we present the Social Media Effort (SME) heuristic to help designers and researchers visualize how content and audience shape the social media ecosystem. We advocate that the HCI community design new platforms, since dominant business models are not poised to support relationship maintenance.

Out-of-school camps are a common means to encourage girls to study computing. However, these camps are often developed and operated by adults. Peer learning, where students teach each other relevant concepts, is a well-established pedagogical practice in computing education. This lightning talk presents two eight-week summer coding camps that the lead author, a 13-year-old high school student, designed and ran for 30 elementary- and middle-school students in her community. The first camp focused on programming in Scratch, and the second on Python. Each 90-minute weekly meeting followed a similar structure. The Scratch camp began with a short video and discussion about a real-world technology (e.g., GPS systems). Students then worked through a coding project, such as creating a basketball game with three players. The Python camp followed a similar format but began with a review of coding concepts followed by a Kahoot quiz and a coding project. The lead author also surveyed nearly 430 middle school students in her state. She found that students expressed little interest in technology careers, in part due to a perception that programming was dull. Peer learning experiences can be a powerful avenue for combatting this disinterest because children have direct knowledge and experience about what other children find engaging. In human-computer interaction, there is a strong foundation of inviting children to lead technology design projects. Through this lightning talk, we aim to inspire a similar movement to take root in computing education and find collaborators to help grow these coding camps.

The process of learning research methods is complex, often propelling students to shift their worldviews as they work to understand concepts and develop skills. We argue that a pedagogy of ungrading, which eschews points-based grading for feedback-based assessment, is well suited to helping students shift their worldviews because it centers engagement over measuring outcomes. We-a faculty instructor and five PhD students-present this experience report detailing the design and implementation of ungrading in a graduate qualitative research methods course in an informatics PhD program. We explain the course design and present self-reflections that illustrate how a pedagogy of ungrading facilitated meaningful learning experiences among students whose research interests span the epistemological and methodological spectrum.

BeReal is the latest social media platform to tout itself as a more authentic space for connection. The app notifies users at a random time each day and gives users two minutes to post an image from their smartphone's front- and back-facing cameras. While prior work has theorized authenticity on social media and studied how various user populations enact authenticity, more research is needed to understand whether and how specific design features afford authenticity. We conducted a walkthrough of the BeReal app and interviewed 31 young adults about their experiences on BeReal. We found that participants approached authenticity in two ways—as extemporaneous interaction and as comprehensive self-presentation—and that BeReal harnesses the affordances of visibility, editability, availability, and persistence in a way that enables the former more than the latter. Based on our findings, we offer four recommendations for designers and researchers who seek to support authenticity online.

Privacy is an important topic in HCI and social computing research, and the theory of contextual integrity (CI) is increasingly used to understand how sociotechnical systems-and the new kinds of information flows they introduce-can violate privacy. In empirical research, CI can serve as a conceptual framework for explaining the contextual nature of privacy as well as an analytical framework for evaluating privacy attitudes and behaviors. Analytical applications of CI in HCI primarily employ quantitative methods to identify appropriate information flows but rarely engage with the full CI framework to evaluate such flows. In this paper, we present a roadmap to guide HCI and social computing researchers on how to apply the full CI framework to qualitative projects. To help researchers envision what such an analysis can look like, each step includes an example analysis using interview data from projects on privacy and fitness tracking. We conclude by discussing how harnessing the full CI framework can address critiques of CI and identify opportunities for further theory development.

Many children are growing up in a “digital-by-default” world, where technologies mediate many of their interactions. There is emerging consensus that those who design technology must support children's privacy and security. However, privacy and security are complex concepts that are challenging to design for, and centering the interests of children is similarly difficult. Through a document analysis of 90 HCI publications, we examine what problems and solutions designing for children's privacy and security addresses and how this research engages with children. Applying Solove's privacy taxonomy, we find that research addresses a range of problems related to information collection, processing, dissemination, and invasion at the organizational, system, and individual levels. Children's participation in this research is largely limited to providing feedback rather than helping to guide the research itself. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for designers to sharpen their privacy and security contributions and center children in their work.

Elementary school educators increasingly use digital technologies to teach students, manage classrooms, and complete everyday tasks. Prior work has considered the educational and pedagogical implications of technology use, but little research has examined how educators consider privacy and security in relation to classroom technology use. To better understand what privacy and security mean to elementary school educators, we conducted nine focus groups with 25 educators across three metropolitan regions in the northeast U.S. Our findings suggest that technology use is an integral part of elementary school classrooms, that educators consider digital privacy and security through the lens of curricular and classroom management goals, and that lessons to teach children about digital privacy and security are rare. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, we identify design opportunities to help educators integrate privacy and security into decisions about digital technology use and to help children learn about digital privacy and security.

Children ages 8--12 spend nearly six hours per day with digital content, but they receive little formal instruction related to managing privacy online. In this study, we explore how games and storytelling can inform the development of resources to help children learn about privacy online. We present results from three co-design sessions with a university-based intergenerational design team that included eight children ages 8--11. During these sessions, we reviewed existing privacy resources with children and elicited design ideas for new resources. Our findings yield several recommendations for designers. Specifically, online privacy-focused educational resources should: (1) include relatable elements such as familiar characters and easily understandable storylines, (2) go beyond instructing children through "dos and don'ts" and equip children to make privacy-related decisions, and (3) expose children to a range of privacy consequences, highlighting the positive and negative outcomes that can result from disclosing and managing information online.

Parents use mobile monitoring software to observe and restrict their children's activities in order to minimize the risks associated with Internet-enabled mobile devices. As children are stakeholders in such technologies, recent research has called for their inclusion in its design process. To investigate children's perceptions of parental mobile monitoring technologies and explore their interaction preferences, we held two co-design sessions with 12 children ages 7-12. Children first reviewed and redesigned an existing mobile monitoring application. Next, they designed ways children could use monitoring software when they encounter mobile risks (e.g., cyberbullying, inappropriate content). Results showed that children acknowledged safety needs and accepted certain parental controls. They preferred and designed controls that emphasized restriction over monitoring, taught risk coping, promoted parent-child communication, and automated interactions. Our results benefit designers looking to develop parental mobile monitoring technologies in ways that children will both accept and can actively benefit from.

In the U.S., consumers increasingly turn to the internet and mobile apps to complete essential personal transactions, ranging from financial payments to job applications. This shift to digital transactions can create challenges for those without reliable home internet connections or with limited digital literacy by requiring them to submit sensitive information on public computers or on unfamiliar websites. Using interviews with 52 families from high-poverty communities in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., we explore the compounding privacy and security challenges that economically disadvantaged individuals face when navigating online services. We describe the real, perceived, and unknown risks they face as they navigate online transactions with limited technical skills, as well as the strategies and heuristics they employ to minimize these risks. The findings highlight a complex relationship between participants' negative experiences and their general mistrust of sharing data through online channels. We also describe a range of strategies participants use to try and protect their personal information. Based on these findings, we offer design recommendations to inform the creation of educational resources that we will develop in the next phase of this project.

Children under age 12 increasingly use Internet-connected devices to go online. And while Internet use exposes people to privacy and security risks, few studies examine how these children perceive and address such concerns. To fill this gap, we conducted a qualitative study of 18 U.S. families with children ages 5-11. We found that children recognized certain privacy and security components from the contextual integrity framework, but children ages 5-7 had gaps in their knowledge. Children developed some strategies to manage concerns but largely relied on parents for support. Parents primarily used passive strategies to mediate children's device use and largely deferred teaching children about these concerns to the future. We argue that helping children develop strong privacy and security practices at a young age will prepare them to manage their privacy and security as adolescents and adults. We offer recommendations to scaffold children's learning on privacy and security.

While extensive research has investigated the risks of children sharing their personal information online, little work has investigated the implications of parents sharing personal information about their children online. Drawing on 102 interviews with parents in the U.S., we investigate how parents decide what to disclose about their children on social network sites (SNSs). We find that mothers take on the responsibility of sharing content about their children more than fathers do. Fathers are more restrictive about sharing to broad and professional audiences and are concerned about sharing content that could be perceived as sexually suggestive. Both mothers and fathers work to leverage affordances of SNSs to limit oversharing. Building on prior work, we explore parental disclosure management, which describes how parents decide what to share about their children online. We also describe an emerging third shift of work that highlights the additional work parents take on to manage children's identities online. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for designing SNSs to better support family life online.

The practice of sharing family photographs is as old as the camera itself. Many mothers now share baby photos online, yet little is known about what kinds of baby photos they share and their motivations for doing so. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 new mothers, we find that they share cute, funny, milestone, and family and friend photos but refrain from sharing crying and naked photos. While some mothers harbor concerns about controlling information, oversharing, and digital footprints, the benefits of receiving validation outweighs their concerns. Sharing baby photos on Facebook helps new mothers enact and receive validation of "good mothering." However, mothers are charged with the responsibility of stewarding their children's privacy and identities online. We introduce the concept of privacy stewardship to describe the responsibility parents take on when deciding what is appropriate to share about their children online and ensuring that family and friends respect and maintain the integrity of those rules. As a result, mothers must exchange benefits of sharing baby photos with risks of creating digital footprints for their child.