Despite the expanding focus on ethics within computing curricula, research ethics – especially around the use of digital data about people – remains under-emphasized. Many computing students, faculty, and researchers report receiving little formal guidance on how to navigate the ethical complexities of collecting, analyzing, and sharing pervasive data such as public social media content, geolocation traces, or behavioral data from smart devices. To address this gap, we will demonstrate the PERVADE Data Ethics Decision Support Tool, a free, browser-based, interactive resource developed by a team of academic researchers as part of the NSF-funded PERVADE (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research) project.

The growing use of technology in K-8 classrooms highlights a parallel need for formal learning opportunities aimed at helping children use technology safely and protect their personal information. Even the youngest students are now using tablets, laptops, and apps to support their learning; however, there are limited curricular materials available for elementary and middle school children on digital privacy and security topics. To bridge this gap, we developed a series of micro-lessons to help K-8 children learn about digital privacy and security at school. We first conducted a formative study by interviewing elementary school teachers to identify the design needs for digital privacy and security lessons. We then developed micro-lessons--multiple 15-20 minute activities designed to be easily inserted into the existing curriculum--using a co-design approach with multiple rounds of developing and revising the micro-lessons in collaboration with teachers. Throughout the process, we conducted evaluation sessions where teachers implemented or reviewed the micro-lessons. Our study identifies strengths, challenges, and teachers' tailoring strategies when incorporating micro-lessons for K-8 digital privacy and security topics, providing design implications for facilitating learning about these topics in school classrooms.

Smart devices--including speakers, cameras, TVs, and sensors--are increasingly used to enhance comfort, efficiency, security, and entertainment in and outside the home. These devices collect significant audio, video, and environmental data, and that data may be shared with device owners, manufacturers, and/or third-parties. Social computing researchers have devoted significant attention to the privacy risks posed by these devices, although the focus has largely been on primary users who have access and control of devices and data. More recently, researchers have begun examining the privacy risks to incidental users --those who do not own or manage devices but still have their data collected due to their presence in a smart environment. In this paper, we present findings from 25 interviews with US-based adults who have encountered and/or used smart devices as incidental users in rental properties, as part of their work, at friends' and family's houses, and in shared living environments. We explore their reactions to these devices across different contexts, as well as their expectations for how devices should be disclosed and managed by primary users. We found a prevailing sense of resignation across our participants, as well behavioral and environmental modifications in response to smart devices. At the same time, participants were disinterested in gaining access and control to other people's devices, and they were hesitant or uncomfortable with the idea of initiating communication with device owners regarding their concern. Many wanted clearer and more prominent disclosures about device and data management that shifted responsibility from the incidental user to the device owner. Based on our findings, we argue for researchers to focus more closely on sociotechnical approaches to help incidental users navigate privacy risks in smart environments. Such approaches must account for interpersonal factors like trust, power dynamics, and social norms in addition to the many technical solutions that have been introduced in recent years.

Children are exposed to technology at home and school at very young ages, often using family mobile devices and educational apps. It is therefore critical that they begin learning about privacy and security concepts during their elementary school years, rather than waiting until they are older. Such skills will help children navigate an increasingly connected world and develop agency over their personal data, online interactions, and online security. In this paper, we explore how a simple technique---a ''Would Your Rather'' (WYR) game involving hypothetical privacy and security scenarios---can support children in working through the nuances of these types of situations and how educators can leverage this approach to support children's privacy and security learning. We conducted three focus groups with 21 children aged 7-12 using the WYR activity and interviewed 13 elementary school teachers about the use of WYR for facilitating privacy and security learning. We found that WYR provided a meaningful opportunity for children to assess privacy and security risks, consider some of the social and emotional aspects of privacy and security dilemmas, and assert their agency in a manner typically unavailable to children in an adult-centric society. Teachers highlighted connections between privacy and security dilemmas and children's social and emotional learning and offered additional insights about using this WYR technique in and beyond their classrooms. Based on these findings, we highlight four opportunities for using WYR to support children in engaging with privacy and security concepts from an early age.

Privacy is an important topic in HCI and social computing research, and the theory of contextual integrity (CI) is increasingly used to understand how sociotechnical systems-and the new kinds of information flows they introduce-can violate privacy. In empirical research, CI can serve as a conceptual framework for explaining the contextual nature of privacy as well as an analytical framework for evaluating privacy attitudes and behaviors. Analytical applications of CI in HCI primarily employ quantitative methods to identify appropriate information flows but rarely engage with the full CI framework to evaluate such flows. In this paper, we present a roadmap to guide HCI and social computing researchers on how to apply the full CI framework to qualitative projects. To help researchers envision what such an analysis can look like, each step includes an example analysis using interview data from projects on privacy and fitness tracking. We conclude by discussing how harnessing the full CI framework can address critiques of CI and identify opportunities for further theory development.

Many children are growing up in a “digital-by-default” world, where technologies mediate many of their interactions. There is emerging consensus that those who design technology must support children's privacy and security. However, privacy and security are complex concepts that are challenging to design for, and centering the interests of children is similarly difficult. Through a document analysis of 90 HCI publications, we examine what problems and solutions designing for children's privacy and security addresses and how this research engages with children. Applying Solove's privacy taxonomy, we find that research addresses a range of problems related to information collection, processing, dissemination, and invasion at the organizational, system, and individual levels. Children's participation in this research is largely limited to providing feedback rather than helping to guide the research itself. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for designers to sharpen their privacy and security contributions and center children in their work.

In most American cities commuters on public transit have disproportionately lower incomes than commuters who use automobiles. Given the proven link between geographic and economic mobility, it is critical to offer quality public transit to improve access to jobs, health care and education opportunities. Departments of Transportation (DOTs) routinely measure public transit performance and quality perceptions to assess the need for improvements in the transit systems. Nevertheless, the performance metrics used fail to capture the experiences of low-income individuals who often endure complex, lengthy trips, requiring several modes or transfers. We propose BALTO, a novel toolkit to characterize transit system performance and passenger’s quality perceptions across all types of passengers and trips. We are designing the BALTO toolkit in collaboration with public housing residents from the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) and together with two local transit advocacy groups and the departments of transportation in Baltimore and in the state of Maryland.

Fueled by Internet-of-Things technologies and spanning a wide range of sensors, speakers, and cameras, smart homes promise to make our lives easier and automate routine tasks. From speakers to security cameras, smart home devices (SHDs) answer our questions, monitor our home environment, and conserve energy. They also collect significant data, ranging from on/off commands to audio and video data, and they do this in some of our most private spaces. In this paper, we explore the privacy risks associated with SHDs by focusing on privacy-conscious smart home power users--those who spend significant time and money to research, install, and integrate devices throughout their homes and engage in advanced device and network management strategies to mitigate privacy concerns. Drawing on data from 10 focus groups with 32 privacy-conscious power users, we identify the key privacy risks they perceive from this technology, as well as how they mitigate those risks through increasingly complex strategies. Our findings reveal that navigating the technical landscape that makes up the smart home environment--including what data is collected, what options are available for managing or restricting data flows, and who has access to data collected by SHDs--is complex and often confusing, even for people who spend significant time researching devices and integration options. We use these findings to argue for further development of tools that are transparent, easy to use, and aligned with the privacy needs of a diverse userbase.

With the rapid shift to remote learning in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, teachers, and students had to quickly adapt to what scholars have called "emergency remote learning" (ERL). This transition required increased reliance on digital tools, exacerbating privacy and security threats associated with expanded data collection and new vulnerabilities. In this study, we adopt a sociotechnical and infrastructural perspective to understand how these threats emerged through breakdowns and tensions in elementary school ERL. Through interviews with 29 US-based teachers and parents of elementary school students (grades PreK-6), we identify two core findings related to privacy and security. First, we detail three breakdowns in the ERL sociotechnical infrastructure: (1) reduced attention to privacy and security issues as parents and teachers cobbled together a patchwork of tools needed to make ERL work; (2) privacy and security risks that emerged from ambiguous and shifting school policies; and (3) the failure to adapt standard authentication mechanisms (e.g., passwords) to be usable by young children. Second, we identify tensions between parents' and teachers' desire to help children advance in their education and their desire for children's privacy and security in ERL, as well as tensions resulting from the collapse of home and school contexts. These findings collectively suggest that ERL exacerbated existing--and created new--privacy and security challenges for young students, and we argue these challenges will carry beyond the pandemic due to the increasing use of technology to supplement traditional education. In light of these findings, we recommend researchers and educators use a framework of care to develop social and technical approaches to improving remote learning in order to protect children's privacy and security.

Significant research has examined social media users' self-presentation strategies, both within a single account and across multiple platforms. Few studies, however, have considered how users' self-presentation varies across multiple accounts on a single platform. In this survey study, we examine how Instagram users manage content sharing decisions and the audience for their content across two types of Instagram accounts: Rinsta ("real" Instagram) and Finsta ("fake" Instagram). Data analyzed includes 499 Finsta and Rinsta posts rated across different dimensions of self-presentation (e.g., self-presentation intention, picture editing effort) and 453 open-ended responses about participants' rationales for using the two accounts. Through this mixed-method approach, we find that Rinsta accounts are more likely to be public, focus on positive and uplifting content, and involve more careful editing and selection, while Finsta accounts are used for more off-the-cuff, emotional, and inappropriate content, as well as those photos that do not make the Rinsta cut. Participants also rated how they perceived responses to their Finsta and Rinsta posts. Mediation analysis suggests that participants perceived responses to Finsta posts as less satisfying, useful, and supportive - partly because Finsta posts contained more negative emotions and received fewer comments than Rinsta posts. We discuss these findings in relation to prior work on social media, self-presentation, and platform affordances, and consider the benefits of this more time-intensive approach to managing two distinct personas on one platform.

Most social media platforms record, display, and archive users' personal histories. This persistence of posts over time can be problematic, as users' self-presentation goals and network composition change, but old content remains. In this paper, we explore an alternative feature that provides control over content persistence. We present findings from interviews with 16 users of the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat Moments. We focused on Moments' Time Limit setting, which makes social media data ephemeral to audiences, but persistent to posters. Interviewees described changes in their self-presentation goals and social network composition over time and reported the Time Limit feature helped them effortlessly manage their desired self-presentation as they matured. Drawing on these findings, we discuss design implications for social media to facilitate greater control over content visibility and persistence, which may have significant benefits for social media users with large and diverse networks.

In this position article, we synthesize various knowledge gaps in information privacy scholarship and propose a research agenda that promotes greater cross‐disciplinary collaboration within the iSchool community and beyond. We start by critically examining Westin's conceptualization of information privacy and argue for a contextual approach that holds promise for overcoming some of Westin's weaknesses. We then highlight three contextual considerations for studying privacy—digital networks, marginalized populations, and the global context—and close by discussing how these considerations advance privacy theorization and technology design.

Elementary school educators increasingly use digital technologies to teach students, manage classrooms, and complete everyday tasks. Prior work has considered the educational and pedagogical implications of technology use, but little research has examined how educators consider privacy and security in relation to classroom technology use. To better understand what privacy and security mean to elementary school educators, we conducted nine focus groups with 25 educators across three metropolitan regions in the northeast U.S. Our findings suggest that technology use is an integral part of elementary school classrooms, that educators consider digital privacy and security through the lens of curricular and classroom management goals, and that lessons to teach children about digital privacy and security are rare. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, we identify design opportunities to help educators integrate privacy and security into decisions about digital technology use and to help children learn about digital privacy and security.

Children ages 8--12 spend nearly six hours per day with digital content, but they receive little formal instruction related to managing privacy online. In this study, we explore how games and storytelling can inform the development of resources to help children learn about privacy online. We present results from three co-design sessions with a university-based intergenerational design team that included eight children ages 8--11. During these sessions, we reviewed existing privacy resources with children and elicited design ideas for new resources. Our findings yield several recommendations for designers. Specifically, online privacy-focused educational resources should: (1) include relatable elements such as familiar characters and easily understandable storylines, (2) go beyond instructing children through "dos and don'ts" and equip children to make privacy-related decisions, and (3) expose children to a range of privacy consequences, highlighting the positive and negative outcomes that can result from disclosing and managing information online.

In the U.S., consumers increasingly turn to the internet and mobile apps to complete essential personal transactions, ranging from financial payments to job applications. This shift to digital transactions can create challenges for those without reliable home internet connections or with limited digital literacy by requiring them to submit sensitive information on public computers or on unfamiliar websites. Using interviews with 52 families from high-poverty communities in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., we explore the compounding privacy and security challenges that economically disadvantaged individuals face when navigating online services. We describe the real, perceived, and unknown risks they face as they navigate online transactions with limited technical skills, as well as the strategies and heuristics they employ to minimize these risks. The findings highlight a complex relationship between participants' negative experiences and their general mistrust of sharing data through online channels. We also describe a range of strategies participants use to try and protect their personal information. Based on these findings, we offer design recommendations to inform the creation of educational resources that we will develop in the next phase of this project.

The popularity, availability, and ubiquity of information and communication technologies create new opportunities for online harassment. The present study evaluates factors associated with young adult women's online harassment experiences through a multi-factor measure accounting for the frequency and severity of negative events. Findings from a survey of 659 undergraduate and graduate students highlight the relationship between harassment, well-being, and engagement in strategies to manage one's online identity. We further identify differences in harassment experiences across three popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We conclude by discussing this study's contribution to feminist theory and describing five potential design interventions derived from our data that may minimize these negative experiences, mitigate the psychological harm they cause, and provide women with more proactive ways to regain agency when using communication technologies.

As organizational security breaches increase, so too does the need to fully understand the human factors that lead to these breaches and take the necessary steps to minimize threats. The present study evaluates how three sets of employee characteristics (demographic, company‐specific, and skills‐based) predict an employee's likelihood of becoming a security breach victim. In order to move beyond traditional evaluations of security threats, which generally consider security threats individually, analyses in this paper approach security vulnerability from a more holistic approach to analyze four risk categories concurrently: phishing, passwords, bring your own device (BYOD), and company‐supplied laptops. Findings from a survey of 250 employees at a medium‐sized American information technology (IT) consulting firm identify higher‐risk employees across the four risk areas and provide new insights into the challenges organizations face when trying to ensure the protection of company data.

Children under age 12 increasingly use Internet-connected devices to go online. And while Internet use exposes people to privacy and security risks, few studies examine how these children perceive and address such concerns. To fill this gap, we conducted a qualitative study of 18 U.S. families with children ages 5-11. We found that children recognized certain privacy and security components from the contextual integrity framework, but children ages 5-7 had gaps in their knowledge. Children developed some strategies to manage concerns but largely relied on parents for support. Parents primarily used passive strategies to mediate children's device use and largely deferred teaching children about these concerns to the future. We argue that helping children develop strong privacy and security practices at a young age will prepare them to manage their privacy and security as adolescents and adults. We offer recommendations to scaffold children's learning on privacy and security.

While social media platforms enable individuals to easily communicate and share experiences, they have also emerged as a tool for cyberbullying. Teenagers represent an especially vulnerable population for negative emotional responses to cyberbullying. At the same time, attempts to mitigate or prevent cyberbullying from occurring in these networked spaces have largely failed because of the complexity and nuance with which young people bully others online. To address challenges related to designing for cyberbullying intervention and mitigation, we detail findings from participatory design work with two groups of high school students in spring 2015. Over the course of five design sessions spanning five weeks, participants shared their experiences with cyberbullying and iteratively designed potential solutions. We provide an in-depth discussion of the range of cyberbullying mitigation solutions participants designed. We focus on challenges participants' identified in designing for cyberbullying support and prevention and present a set of five potential cyberbullying mitigation solutions based on the results of the design sessions.

Pervasive information streams that document people and their routines have been a boon to social computing research. But the ethics of collecting and analyzing available&-but potentially sensitive-online data present challenges to researchers. In response to increasing public and scholarly debate over the ethics of online data research, this paper analyzes the current state of practice among researchers using online data. Qualitative and quantitative responses from a survey of 263 online data researchers document beliefs and practices around which social computing researchers are converging, as well as areas of ongoing disagreement. The survey also reveals that these disagreements are not correlated with disciplinary, methodological, or workplace affiliations. The paper concludes by reflecting on changing ethical practices in the digital age, and discusses a set of emergent best practices for ethical social computing research.

The increasing ubiquity of information and communication technologies has dramatically impacted interpersonal communication and relationship maintenance processes. These technologies remove temporal and spatial constraints, enabling communication at a distance for low to no physical costs. Research has established that technologies such as email supplement other forms of communication in relationship maintenance, but to what extent do newer technologies--which contain a unique set of affordances--facilitate these processes? Furthermore, do SNS users engage in different practices through the site and obtain different relational benefits based on specific characteristics of the tie? Findings from a survey of adult Facebook users (N=415) indicate that geographically distant Facebook Friends, as well as those who rely on the site as their primary form of communication, engage in relationship maintenance strategies through the site to a greater extent and perceive the site to have a more positive impact on the quality of their relationships.

Guided by the underlying question of how--if at all--the self-disclosure process varies online, the present study explores the self-disclosure practices of 26 American graduate students on Facebook through in-depth interviews. Building on work by Derlega and Grzelak [12] on self- disclosure goals and focusing on the affordances of the site, findings reveal both commonalities with and extensions to existing communication research on self-disclosure, as users saw both benefits and drawbacks to the high visibility and persistence of content shared through the site. Furthermore, users employed a wide spectrum of strategies to help them achieve their disclosure goals while decreasing perceived risks associated with making disclosures in a public forum. Importantly, these strategies generally sought to recreate the offline boundaries blurred or removed by the technical structure of the site and allow users to engage in a more strategic disclosure process with their network.

Research has identified a link between Facebook use and bridging social capital, which speaks to the informational resources provided by a diverse network of connections. In order to explicate the mechanism through which Facebook may help individuals mobilize these embedded informational and support resources, this study explores the role of bridging social capital, question type, and relational closeness on the perceived utility and satisfaction of information obtained through questions posed to one's network of Facebook Friends through the status update feature. Employing a mixed-method approach, we utilize survey data collected from a sample of non-academic university staff (N=666), as well as actual Facebook question examples and responses collected during a follow-up lab session from a subset of this sample (N=71). Results indicate that question-askers' bridging social capital positively predicts the utility of responses received on SNS, while useful responses are more likely to be received from weaker ties.

Although Facebook is the largest social network site in the U.S. and attracts an increasingly diverse userbase, some individuals have chosen not to join the site. Using survey data collected from a sample of non-academic staff at a large Midwestern university (N=614), we explore the demographic and cognitive factors that predict whether a person chooses to join Facebook. We find that older adults and those with higher perceived levels of bonding social capital are less likely to use the site. Analyzing open-ended responses from non-users, we find that they express concerns about privacy, context collapse, limited time, and channel effects in deciding to not adopt Facebook. Finally, we compare non-adopters against users who differ on three dimensions of use. We find that light users often have social capital outcomes similar to, or worse than, non-users, and that heavy users report higher perceived bridging and bonding social capital than either group.

Facebook has become an increasingly important tool for people engaging in a range of communication behaviors, including requesting help from their social network to address information needs. Through a study of 614 staff members at a large university, we show how social capital, network characteristics, and use of Facebook are related to how useful individuals find Facebook to be for informational purposes and their propensity to seek different types of information on the site. We find that bridging social capital and engagement with one's network through directed communication behaviors are important predictors of these dimensions of information seeking; furthermore, a number of demographic and usage behavior differences exist between those who choose to engage in information-seeking behaviors on Facebook and those who do not. Finally, when predicting information-seeking behaviors, we identify a significant interaction between users' perceptions of Facebook as appropriate for purposes beyond the purely social and their engagement with their network.