Mobile phones, as simultaneously personal and shared technologies, complicate how partners manage digital privacy in intimate relationships. While prior research has examined device-access practices, explicit privacy-rule negotiation, and toxic practices (e.g., surveillance), little is known about how couples manage digital privacy without direct discussion in everyday relationships. To address this gap, we ask: How is digital privacy managed non-verbally and across different media in mobile phones? Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews, we find that partners often regulate privacy practices of privacy silence —the intentional avoidance of privacy-related conversations. Five motivations for leaving boundaries unspoken: perceiving privacy as unnecessary in intimacy, assuming implicit respect for boundaries, signaling trust and closeness, avoiding potential conflict or harm, and responding to broader societal and cultural expectations that discourage explicit privacy talk. We also identify a hierarchical grouping of content-specific privacy sensitivities, ranging from highly private domains (e.g., financial data) to lower-risk domains (e.g., streaming accounts), and show how these priorities shift across relationship stages. These findings show how silence, culture, and content sensitivity shape everyday boundary-setting and underscore the relational and emotional dynamics underpinning mobile-phone privacy management.

Minors are at risk of myriad harms online, yet online dating romance scams are seldom considered one of them. While research on romance scams in Western countries finds victims to be predominantly middle-age, it is unknown whether minors in geographic regions with cultural norms around teenage marriage are uniquely susceptible to online dating romance scams. We present an interview study with 16 victims of online dating romance scams in Iran who were minors when scammed. Our findings show that, with Western dating apps banned in Iran, scammers locate teenage victims through messaging platforms tethered to local neighborhoods, offering relief from parental pressures related to finding a marital partner and academic performance. Using threats, lies, and the exploitation of emotional attachment lacking from their families, scammers pressured minors into financial and sexual favors. This study demonstrates how local cultural context should be foregrounded in future research on, and solutions for, technology-mediated harm against minors. Content Warning: This paper discusses sexual abuse.

As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers increasingly conduct studies involving populations with stigmatised identities, more researchers must focus on creating conversational spaces where participants feel comfortable discussing their experiences. This study unpacks how and why HCI researchers engage in self-disclosure to facilitate such spaces. We share eight autoethnographic personal stories of key moments when we disclosed or concealed personal information in our HCI studies with diverse participant groups (people with dementia, victims of online romance scams, children with autism, and North Korean defectors). Through analysing these stories, we found that these decisions were shaped by various goals: creating a welcoming environment, demonstrating credibility, establishing common ground, reducing stigma, and directing the interview’s focus. The acts of disclosure or concealment affected the interactions with participants, the collected data, and the well-being of the researcher and participant. We argue that greater awareness, reflection, guidance, and sharing are needed regarding self-disclosure in HCI research and offer a reflexive guide to help researchers prepare for and reflect on their self-disclosure practices. By making these practices visible and open to discussion, we aim to make researcher-participant interactions in sensitive settings more ethical, effective, and transparent. • HCI researchers dynamically disclose/conceal personal information with stigmatised groups. • Researchers differ in the who/what/when/why(not)/how of their self-disclosure. • HCI lacks awareness, guidelines, and transparency for researcher self-disclosure. • Reflexivity around self-disclosure is needed for ethical and effective research.

Online dating romance scams involve coercing online daters out of their personal property. Money is almost always framed as the target of such scams, however this may be a consequence of prior work's focus on victims from Western countries and scammers from Africa. There is relatively little knowledge of online dating romance scams that occur entirely within non-Western cultures. To address this we conducted an interview study with 20 victims of online dating romance scams in Iran. Findings show that romance scams were seldom motivated by money, but rather sexual access to a woman's body through feigning intent to get married (''body scams''). Body scammers were abetted by cultural rules that justify murder and legal punishment of women for premarital sex, thus forcing them into silence. The paper concludes with calls for more expansive definitions of online dating romance scams and the foregrounding of local cultural dynamics in their perpetuation. Content Warning: This paper discusses sexual violence.