In today’s digital age, searching for information online is considered a ubiquitous task that can be accomplished in just a few moments using various web-based technologies. Yet, information seeking has geopolitical burdens for users who are racialized and marginalized by the nation-state and other structures of power. In our paper, we conducted a qualitative interview study with 15 Muslim participants, mostly of South Asian origin, living in the US with varying citizenship or (non)immigration status about their information needs and concerns around privacy as a Muslim, and the resulting restrictive patterns of information seeking on various Internet platforms. We argue that our findings on the barriers faced and strategies employed by Muslim residents toward information access suggest a broader pattern of digital manifestations of border imperialism. We posit that HCI researchers should pay attention to how “digital borders" have epistemic implications for people marginalized by geopolitical boundaries.

Historically, crafts have been associated with women’s small-scale creative production in the home, equated with hobbies or amateur production, and devalued in comparison to both art and industrial production. During its early years, Etsy was seen as a champion of “handmade”, bringing visibility to crafts and providing economic value. This paper presents results of a qualitative study with 18 small online sellers of Etsy platform. Our study shows that Etsy’s sociotechnical design results in a high burden of invisible labor for sellers, including categories of labor not replicated by other online platforms. These new categories include negotiation and articulation work around defining and defending “handmade” products, understanding one’s intellectual property and how (and whether) to defend that IP elsewhere on the platform, understanding working of platform algorithms and adapting to changing platform regulations. Our findings provide new ways to frame the challenges faced by producers/sellers on emerging marketplace platforms.

Mobile-based scams are on the rise in emerging markets. However, the awareness about these scams and ways to avoid them remains limited among mobile users. We present a qualitative analysis of the dynamics of mobile-based fraud (specifically, SMS and call-based fraud) in Pakistan. We interviewed 96 participants, including different stakeholders in the mobile financial ecosystem: 71 victims of mobile-based scams, seven non-victims, 15 mobile money agents, and three officials from regulatory agencies that investigate mobile-based fraud. Leveraging the perspectives from these stakeholders and analyzing mobile-based fraud with a four-step social-engineering attack framework, we make four concrete contributions: First, we identify the nuances as well as specific tactics, methods, and resources that fraudsters use to scam mobile users. Second, we look at other actors, beyond the victim and the adversary, involved or affected by fraud and their roles at each step of the fraud process. Third, we discuss victims' understanding of mobile fraud, their behavior post-realization, and their attitudes toward reporting fraud. Finally, we discuss possible points of intervention and offer design recommendations to thwart mobile fraud, including addressing the vulnerabilities discovered in the ecosystem, utilizing existing actors to mitigate the consequences of these attacks, and realigning the design of fraud reporting mechanisms with the sociocultural practices.

This paper studies the use of Digital Financial Services (DFS) as a solution to women's financial inclusion in deeply patriarchal, resource constrained communities. Through a qualitative, empirical study we map the financial life cycles of 20 women micro-entrepreneurs in different cities in Pakistan and the challenges they face. We explore how technology is currently influencing these women's businesses and personal lives and reveal how mobile money is not tuned to the problems they face and their financial needs. We present alternate design directions for meeting the technological and financial needs of these women, circumnavigating the patriarchal structures that constrain them.

SMS fraud has become a growing concern for those working toward financial inclusion, however, it is often unclear how widespread such threats are in practice. This multi-method study investigates SMS fraud in Pakistan through identification and categorization of fraudulent messages as well as the impact on those who receive such messages. We collect fraudulent SMS messages by various means, including byway of a custom-built Android smartphone application. To complement this, we interview people exposed to SMS fraud and representatives of mobile network operators. Based on our analysis, lottery type fraud schemes dominate SMS fraud in Pakistan, and these schemes have the greatest impact on vulnerable low-income, rural populations. We offer a simple heuristic for fraud detection that has a high accuracy rate and is adaptable to evolving fraud schemes, and conclude with a recommendation for a fraud mitigation strategy to target fraudster call back numbers.

The intersection of Islam and gender affect technological and social interactions for Muslim women in significant ways and remains an understudied domain for CSCW and related fields. Building on 73 qualitative interviews with low-income women in Punjab, Pakistan, we analyze the complexity of family relationships and the subsequent dynamics of authority around technology uptake and usage by women within non-Western contexts, and, specifically, within the Islamic world. We argue that a Pakistani woman's experience with technology depends on many factors, including gendered roles, generational differences in a family, and wider socio-cultural and religious influences against the backdrop of a culturally conservative and patriarchal society. Our paper highlights the rich family dynamics, including key life events, that transform the roles of both Muslim women and their relatives. Our work is intended to inform scholars, practitioners within development agencies and industry, and other individuals studying technology and development about household dynamics that influence Muslim women's use of technology to encourage them to consider these dynamics during design and implementation processes for technological inclusion.

Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) is a mechanism of informal collaborative savings that is widely used across the globe. Despite its popularity and prevalence, it is not well-studied from HCI and CSCW perspectives. The global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS) for greater financial inclusion but there have not been any DFS-based interventions around ROSCAs. In this paper, we report a qualitative study involving 80 individuals to understand the dynamics of ROSCAs and opportunities for their digitization in the Pakistani context. We also present a smartphone-based Digital ROSCA platform designed on top of a simulated mobile money system. The platform was designed to be inclusive towards low-literate users. We present qualitative findings of its evaluation with 15 users (3 individual ROSCA groups). We find that digitization has the potential to support and strengthen traditional ROSCAs by mitigating issues like record-keeping, delayed payments, collection, distribution, and safety of money. It also allows the creation of payment history for individuals that can be used to score their financial credibility.

In resource-constrained economies, lack of financial participation prohibits women's economic empowerment and opportunities to improve circumstances. With the advent of Digital Financial Services (DFS), a growing emphasis has been placed on the possible positive impact of DFS on lives of individuals. However, for people to understand, adopt, and use DFS, they require certain prerequisites and enablers. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach to analyze the gendered barriers in the readiness for and adoption of DFS as well as the impact of gendered roles in curtailing or enhancing the same. We present our analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews to evaluate the affordances or, lack thereof, in affordability of funds, authority of transactions, access to technological devices, and agency of social and cultural mobility--all of which are prerequisites to fully utilizing DFS. We discuss the sociocultural and religious context in Pakistan that underpins some of these gendered barriers and the perceived views of both men and women.

Worldwide, two billion people remain unbanked, the majority of whom reside in resource-constrained environments. While banks have limited reach due to high overhead costs of physical expansion, the global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS). However, access to mobile applications alone is insufficient to ensure their trial, adoption, or continued usage. In this paper, we report a three phase learnability evaluation (N=118) of smartphone-based mobile wallet applications conducted in Pakistan. We discuss ways in which previous exposure or domain knowledge improve learnability, and we recommend that metrics for learnability should include effectiveness and help sought, independent of usability. We also identify DFS adoption opportunities such as user readiness, interface improvements, and women's independence. All of these opportunities stem from awareness and understanding of relevance, which in our case occurred as a consequence of exposure to the application under evaluation.