Gaming is a meaningful part of children’s lives, yet its safety has drawn increasing concerns from scholars and the public. On platforms like Roblox, children may encounter extremist roleplay, scams, or virtual rape. Prior research has emphasized technical interventions that address risks after they occur and ethical frameworks for game design, but children’s perspectives on safety design remain missing. To address this gap, we conducted a cooperative inquiry study to co-design safety mechanisms with 22 children aged 7–12. Children proposed designs emphasizing transparent information about games and purchases, community accountability through reporting and reviews, player empowerment to manage social boundaries and engagement, and age-appropriate game navigation. Our findings extend safety-by-design research by foregrounding children’s perspectives, showing how they envision safety mechanisms across both game and platform design, while enjoying safe play through risk exposure, allocating trust, and balancing platform support with agency.

Abstract The smooth functioning of the gig economy relies on gig workers’ local execution of tasks assigned by global platforms like Uber. Within this broader workforce, gig drivers (e.g., rideshare and delivery workers) draw on their local knowledge – information and skills specific to a particular region – to navigate and optimize routes. Building on a substantial body of research on gig work, this study turns attention to how gig drivers develop and deploy knowledge practices within the gig economy infrastructure. To address this, we analyzed 25 semi-structured interviews, revealing how drivers’ knowledge practices enable them to adapt platform systems to local conditions, develop algorithmic-local knowledge by integrating insights about platform behavior and market dynamics, and strategically regulate knowledge exchange with peers. We discuss how such knowledge practices play a critical role in localizing platform work, bridging the gaps between gig platforms’ global standards and local conditions.

The HCI community has been actively developing and studying the use of Personal Informatics (PI) systems.While celebrating the headways, researchers have uncovered many unintended consequences of using PI systems, such as data-induced stress and obsessive tracking, but there has been a lack of systematic analysis of these consequences and their underlying causes.In this work, we reviewed 172 PI research articles, highlighting that tracking and interacting with personal data can adversely affect individuals' cognitive load, emotional well-being, social acts, and behaviors, while bringing practical challenges.By synthesizing the pathways through which these consequences occur, we recognized issues in the data-centric design ideology, variations across tracking needs and literacy, the evolving social dynamics, and individuals' intention-behavior gap.Reflecting on the findings, we discuss how to best leverage personal data in our lives and propose a practice-oriented research agenda to mitigate these unintended consequences.

User-generated game (UGG) platforms like Roblox are enormously popular among children but are increasingly scrutinized for safety risks, such as gambling-like gameplay features and disturbing game themes such as slavery and Nazi roleplay. Researchers have started to examine harms in UGGs, but little attention has been paid to how game creators themselves consider child safety in their game making practices. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 20 Roblox creators with varied degrees of success. We found that our interviewees observed several types of risks to child players’ safety in their games, such as child-specific deceptive design, gambling-like gameplay, sexual abuse, and scamming. They further reasoned about major causes of these safety risks, such as Roblox's profit-driven monetization model, and leaving the burden of moderation to individual game creators. We discuss implications for platform governance on UGG platforms as well as policymaking.

Personally identifiable information (PII) is a fundamental concept in privacy research and regulations. Understanding users' perspectives on PII is critical, as their understanding of PII can significantly affect their privacy decisions and practices. While much research has explored users’ privacy perceptions and disclosure preferences regarding PII, less attention has been focused on how users internally define and conceptualize PII. In this study, we conducted interviews with 32 participants to investigate their conceptualization and understanding of PII, using period and fertility tracking apps as the context. Our findings reveal how users perceive the processes and contexts through which personal information, by becoming identifiable, transitions into PII, as well as concerns about data sharing and misuse in these apps. We conclude by advocating for addressing the misalignment between users' perceptions of PII and the regulatory protections and privacy designs surrounding it.

Tracking is inherent in and central to the gig economy. Platforms track gig workers’ performance through metrics such as acceptance rate and punctuality, while gig workers themselves engage in self-tracking. Although prior research has extensively examined how gig platforms track workers through metrics – with some studies briefly acknowledging the phenomenon of self-tracking among workers – there is a dearth of studies that explore how and why gig workers track themselves. To address this, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews, revealing how gig workers self-track to manage accountabilities to themselves and external entities across three identities: the holistic self, the entrepreneurial self, and the platformized self. We connect our findings to neoliberalism, through which we contextualize gig workers’ self-accountability and the invisible labor of self-tracking. We further discuss how self-tracking mitigates information and power asymmetries in gig work and offer design implications to support gig workers’ multi-dimensional self-tracking.

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade gave states the license to ban abortion, numerous people in US have grown to worry about privacy in using period and fertility tracking apps. To address these concerns, some app companies have issued public statements to engage in privacy communication with their users. Prior literature has investigated period and fertility tracking apps’ data practices in their privacy policies. However, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding how companies use privacy communication to address historic privacy-related events such as the overturn. To address the gap, this study investigated app companies’ public statements addressing the overturn of Roe using a combined approach of thematic and discourse analysis. Our findings revealed that companies strategically emphasize their commitment to privacy by demonstrating how their business practices and values are closely intertwined with their efforts to protect user data. We conclude by discussing translatable implications for privacy research.