Live streaming platforms are rapidly emerging as popular forms of online entertainment. Yet many users report challenges, most notably a loss of autonomy in managing their spending and consumption. This erosion of autonomy is often reinforced by deceptive patterns embedded in platform design. In this paper, we examine how users experience and perceive autonomy on live streaming platforms. Through a systematic analysis of Douyin, a popular live streaming platform, we identified 27 deceptive patterns, complemented by 15 semi-structured interviews with platform users. Our findings reveal that users experience significant loss of autonomy, including compulsive overspending, disrupted daily routines, forced labor patterns, and increased anxiety, and expressed strong desires for autonomy-supportive alternatives. We provide insights into the design of future live streaming as autonomy-supportive installations, introducing an installation theory–derived framing that helps identify where autonomy breaks down and envision user-centered layered alternatives within entrenched platform infrastructures.

Generative AI is increasingly present in children’s learning environments, yet little is known about how families navigate this technology in middle childhood (ages 7–13), when parental guidance remains strong but children seek independence. Drawing on self-directed learning (SDL), we explore how parents in our exploratory sample perceived children’s emerging self-directness and agency. Through focus groups with 13 parent–child pairs, we examine parents’ views on children’s AI literacy development, readiness factors, and mediation strategies. Parents described emergent pathways shaped by screen time, self-directness, and knowledge growth. They often confined AI to learning-only contexts, positioning it as a tutor while overlooking non-learning uses and risks such as privacy and infrastructural embedding. Many acknowledged limited AI literacy and turned to joint engagement as opportunities for co-learning. Our findings surface possible parental pathways of children’s AI literacy, highlight gaps between pragmatic expectations and critical literacies, and offer situated design considerations for AI systems that scaffold SDL while balancing oversight with autonomy.

Decentralised social media (DSM) platforms such as Mastodon offer community-governed alternatives to corporate social networks but place substantial governance burdens on volunteer operators. As interest grows in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to support this work, little is known about whether DSM operators want AI, what roles they consider appropriate, and what governance boundaries they require. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 operators across Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy, Pleroma, and Funkwhale, using generative feature probes and speculative scenarios to explore their perceptions of AI. Operators rejected AI as an autonomous actor, instead envisioning it as governance infrastructure that provides contextual intelligence, supports cross-instance coordination, and sustains community and moderator well-being. They also articulated strict boundaries rooted in DSM values, including human accountability, reversibility, transparency, community-centred configuration, and strong data-governance constraints. We contribute empirical insights and design implications for AI compatible with decentralised, federated social media.

Unlike any previous generation, children's lives are now highly datafied, tracked, and digitally monitored.They are increasingly vulnerable to data collection from seemingly innocuous toys and devices with cameras, sensors, voice recognition, and geolocation.Yet, children typically lack awareness or control over these data exchanges, as consent is usually given by adult caregivers (who may also lack data literacy).Despite regulatory improvements, interdisciplinary approaches remain crucial to empowering children to understand, value, and manage their personal data.How can the IDC community involve children in the design and use of their personal data?This workshop unites experts to explore current practices.1 CCS Concepts• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design 1 This workshop merged with "Towards a Research Agenda for Including Children and their Care Ecosystems in HCI" to run a joint workshop: Grasping Data Together: Interdisciplinary Agendas for Engaging Children and their Care Ecosystems with their personal data

Social media has become a primary source of entertainment and education for children globally. While much attention has been given to children’s online well-being, a pressing concern often goes unnoticed: the pervasive data harvesting underlying social media and its manipulative impact on undermining children’s autonomy. In this paper, we present CHAITok, an Android mobile application designed to enhance children’s sense of autonomy over their data on social media. Through 27 user study sessions with 109 children aged 10–13, we offer insights into the current lack of data autonomy among children regarding their online information, and how we can foster children’s sense of data autonomy through a socio-technical journey. Our findings inspire design recommendations to respect children’s values, support children’s evolving autonomy, and design for children’s digital rights. We emphasize data autonomy as a fundamental right for children, call for further research, design innovation, and policy changes on this critical issue.

Children today are deeply immersed in the online world, where their activities are routinely tracked, analysed, and monetised. This exposes them to various datafication risks, including harmful profiling, micro-targeting and behavioural engineering. Most existing measures focus on immediate online threats, rather than informing children about these implicit risks. In this paper, we present The KOALA Hero Toolkit, a hybrid toolkit designed to help children and parents jointly understand the datafication risks posed by their mobile apps. Through user studies involving 17 families we evaluate how the toolkit influenced families’ thought processes, perceptions and decision-making regarding mobile datafication risks. Our findings show that KOALA Hero supports families’ critical thinking and promotes family engagement. We identify future design recommendations for family support, featuring ideas such as integrating triggering moments and bonding moments in toolkit designs. This work provides timely inputs on global efforts aimed at addressing datafication risks and underscores the importance of strengthening legislative and policy enforcement of ethical data governance.

Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance. We emphasise the importance of considering the community's values and diversity when designing future support mechanisms.

In recent years, growing research has been made on supporting children to become more autonomous in the digital environment around them. However, there has been little consensus regarding the conceptualisation of digital autonomy for children in the HCI community and how best they can be supported. Through a systematic review of autonomy-supportive designs within HCI research, this paper makes three contributions: a landscape overview of the existing conceptualisation of Digital Autonomy for children within HCI; a framework of 12 distinct design mechanisms for supporting children’s digital autonomy, clustered into 5 categories by their common mechanisms; and an identification of 5 critical design considerations for future support of children’s digital autonomy. Our findings provide a critical understanding of current support for children’s digital autonomy in HCI. We highlight the importance of considering children’s digital autonomy from multi-perspectives and suggest critical factors and gaps to be considered for future autonomy-supportive designs.

Datafication refers to the practices through which children’s online actions are pervasively recorded, tracked, aggregated, analysed, and exploited by online services in ways including behavioural engineering and monetisation. Previous research has shown that not only do children care significantly about various aspects of datafication, but they demand a chance to take action. Through 10 co-design sessions with 53 children, we examined how children in the UK want to be supported to cope with the datafication practices. Our findings provide insights for creating age-appropriate support for children’s algorithmic literacy development, highlighting and unpacking the importance of no one-size-fitting-all designs to support children’s coping with datafication. We contribute a first understanding of how children aged 7–14 would like to be supported with datafication and what future data-driven digital experiences should be like for them, who demand a shift of the current data ecosystem towards a more humane-by-design and autonomy-supportive future.

Children’s online activities are routinely tracked, aggregated, and exploited by online services, to manipulate children’s online behaviour or monetise. This contributes to the so-called datafied childhood. Unfortunately, such datafication remains largely invisible behind the services and is practically impossible to avoid. Existing approaches largely focus on direct online harms, and provide limited support to raise children’s awareness or understanding of how their data may be processed, transmitted across platforms, and used to affect their best interests. Through co-design workshops, we identified key barriers for children and families to cope with this type of data privacy risk. Our contribution is that instead of regarding children as passive users and needing protection, we draw on critical digital literacy theories and design a KOALA Hero app, which is aimed to enhance children’s cognitive, situated and critical thinking of datafication and online data privacy risks. KOALA Hero represents our first step towards facilitating children’s understanding of the invisible data privacy risks. We hope future empirical evaluations will further inform us regarding how our design approaches may affect the thinking process and behaviours of children and families.

AI systems are becoming increasingly pervasive within children’s devices, apps, and services. However, it is not yet well-understood how risks and ethical considerations of AI relate to children. This paper makes three contributions to this area: first, it identifies ten areas of alignment between general AI frameworks and codes for age-appropriate design for children. Then, to understand how such principles relate to real application contexts, we conducted a landscape analysis of children’s AI systems, via a systematic literature review including 188 papers. This analysis revealed a wide assortment of applications, and that most systems’ designs addressed only a small subset of principles among those we identified. Finally, we synthesised our findings in a framework to inform a new “Code for Age-Appropriate AI”, which aims to provide timely input to emerging policies and standards, and inspire increased interactions between the AI and child-computer interaction communities.

Datafication, which is the process in which children's actions online are pervasively recorded, tracked, aggregated, analysed, and exploited by online services in multiple ways that include behavioural engineering, and monetisation, is becoming increasing common in the online world today. However, we know little about how children feel about such practices and how they perceive datafication. Through online interviews with 48 children aged 7-13 from UK schools, we examined how children perceive datafication practices, especially how such practices could make inference on them. We identified three key knowledge gaps in children's perceptions, including their lack of recognition of who were involved in the data processing and how, data being transmitted across platforms, and their data ownership. Through situating our findings under a critical algorithmic literacy framework, our findings provided some immediate indications regarding how we could better support children in the datafied society through more transparency and autonomy-supportive designs, as well as the need for a fundamental shift of the current data governance structure.

Parental control apps, which are mobile apps that allow parents to monitor and restrict their children's activities online, are becoming increasingly adopted by parents as a means of safeguarding their children's online safety. However, it is not clear whether these apps are always beneficial or effective in what they aim to do; for instance, the overuse of restriction and surveillance has been found to undermine parent-child relationship and children's sense of autonomy. While previous research has categorised and taken inventory of key features of popular parental control apps, they have not systematically analysed the ways such features were designed or realised in such apps, or in particular how aspects of such designs might relate to parents and children's experiences with such apps. In this work, we investigate this gap, asking specifically: how might children's and parents' perceptions be related to how parental control features were designed? To investigate this question, we conducted an analysis of 58 top Android parental control apps designed for the purpose of promoting children's online safety, finding three major axes of variation in how key restriction and monitoring features were realised: granularity, feedback/transparency, and parent-child communications support. To relate these axes to perceived benefits and problems, we then analysed 3264 app reviews to identify references to aspects of the each of the axes above, to understand children's and parents' views of how such dimensions related to their experiences with these apps. Our findings led towards 1) an understanding of how parental control apps realise their functionalities differently along three axes of variation, 2) an analysis of exactly the ways that such variation influences children's and parents' perceptions, respectively of the usefulness or effectiveness of these apps, and finally 3) an identification of design recommendations and opportunities for future apps by contextualising our findings within existing digital parenting theories.

Children under 11 are often regarded as too young to comprehend the implications of online privacy. Perhaps as a result, little research has focused on younger kids' risk recognition and coping. Such knowledge is, however, critical for designing efficient safeguarding mechanisms for this age group. Through 12 focus group studies with 29 children aged 6-10 from UK schools, we examined how children described privacy risks related to their use of tablet computers and what information was used by them to identify threats. We found that children could identify and articulate certain privacy risks well, such as information oversharing or revealing real identities online; however, they had less awareness with respect to other risks, such as online tracking or game promotions. Our findings offer promising directions for supporting children's awareness of cyber risks and the ability to protect themselves online.