HCI has explored voice assistant (VA) use across various social settings, highlighting their impact on personal and familial dynamics. Yet, the progressive domestication of these devices over time and their longer-term impact on relationships remain underexplored. We present findings from a three-year study of 30 households using interviews and diaries. Our analysis introduces the concept of a domestication calculus that captures how VAs find—or fail to find—a home over time through shifting spatial arrangements, relational roles, and household routines. Domestication unfolded not as a linear sequence of stages but as a dynamic process in which devices were either embedded into routines, withdrawn from use, or repurposed in response to changing circumstances. Across these trajectories, participants attributed four recurring roles to their VAs: (1) negotiators, (2) separators, (3) mediators, and (4) amplifiers of shared life. We conclude with implications for designing VAs that support long-term domestication.

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.

People's identities change during life transitions, e.g., studying abroad. They bring everyday objects that embody memories and reflect their identities during such moves. To assist in these transitions, we ask how people's human identities could be influenced by their objects through an artificial agent. This paper presents an exploratory research-through-design study around how people undergoing life transitions experience conversing with their everyday objects through a chatbot. Drawing on a two-week field deployment and interviews with 12 participants, we contribute (1) a conceptualization of 'trans-embodiment' describing the asynchronous imagination of object and human identities on the chatbot, (2) empirical evidence of the resulting emotional and reflective experiences, and (3) three types of object identities for designing conversational agents that role-play objects. Our contributions sum up to triangulating human-agent-object identity as trans-embodiment in supporting life transitions.

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.