Traditional estate planning practices enable people to provide their heirs access to the assets left behind but are often insufficient for the transfer and management of online accounts. To understand how estate planning practices could be improved, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with older adults in the United States that explored their practices, concerns, and needs regarding postmortem online account access and management. We encountered few formalized digital estate planning practices; many participants use their credential management practices—primarily pen-and-paper—to provide postmortem account access. How participants envision account transfer is motivated by trust in their current practices and in their heirs, while concerns regarding technology hinder adoption of new methods. Participants consistently prioritize accounts with financial assets, and expectations surrounding postmortem account management vary based on individual circumstances, with the common goal of reducing burdens on executors and heirs. Our results suggest the need for developing technical standardization and expert guidance for digital estate planning.

Domain probe lists---used to determine which URLs to probe for Web censorship---play a critical role in Internet censorship measurement studies. Indeed, the size and accuracy of the domain probe list limits the set of censored pages that can be detected; inaccurate lists can lead to an incomplete view of the censorship landscape or biased results. Previous efforts to generate domain probe lists have been mostly manual or crowdsourced. This approach is time-consuming, prone to errors, and does not scale well to the ever-changing censorship landscape. In this paper, we explore methods for automatically generating probe lists that are both comprehensive and up-to-date for Web censorship measurement. We start from an initial set of 139,957 unique URLs from various existing test lists consisting of pages from a variety of languages to generate new candidate pages. By analyzing content from these URLs (i.e., performing topic and keyword extraction), expanding these topics, and using them as a feed to search engines, our method produces 119,255 new URLs across 35,147 domains. We then test the new candidate pages by attempting to access each URL from servers in eleven different global locations over a span of four months to check for their connectivity and potential signs of censorship. Our measurements reveal that our method discovered over 1,400 domains---not present in the original dataset---we suspect to be blocked. In short, automatically updating probe lists is possible, and can help further automate censorship measurements at scale.

Abstract Recent privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA have emphasized the need for transparent, understandable privacy policies. This work investigates the role technical terms play in policy transparency. We identify potentially misunderstood technical terms that appear in privacy policies through a survey of current privacy policies and a pilot user study. We then run a user study on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate whether users can accurately define these technical terms, to identify commonly held misconceptions, and to investigate how the use of technical terms affects users’ comfort with privacy policies. We find that technical terms are broadly misunderstood and that particular misconceptions are common. We also find that the use of technical terms affects users’ comfort with various privacy policies and their reported likeliness to accept those policies. We conclude that current use of technical terms in privacy policies poses a challenge to policy transparency and user privacy, and that companies should take steps to mitigate this effect.