Has widespread news of abuse changed the public's perceptions of how user-contributed content from social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can be used? We collected two datasets that reflect participants' attitudes about content ownership, privacy, and control, one in April 2018, while Cambridge Analytica was still in the news, and another in February 2019, after the event had faded from the headlines, and aggregated the data according to participants' awareness of the story, contrasting the attitudes of those who reported the greatest awareness with those who reported the least. Participants with the greatest awareness of the news story's details have more polarized attitudes about reuse, especially the reuse of content as data. They express a heightened desire for data mobility, greater concern about networked privacy rights, increased skepticism of algorithmically targeted advertising and news, and more willingness for social media platforms to demand corrections of inaccurate or deceptive content.

In this paper, we present the results of a study examining 244 participants' attitudes about the value, ownership, and control of social network data. We use Facebook-based scenarios to elicit reactions to hypothetical statements about saving social network content that belongs to others, reusing, repurposing, and monetizing social network data, and removing social network content that is not specifically one's own. Participants also report on their own practices in each of these areas. Findings not only address issues related to ownership, but also explore the use of social networks as documentary records, and the discrepancies between participants' perceptions of how they would like their social network content to be used, and how it is actually used.

We present findings from a qualitative study of self-search, also known as ego or vanity search. In the context of a broader study about personal online content, participants were asked to search for themselves using their own computers and the browsers and queries they would normally adopt. Our analysis highlights five motivations for self-search: as a form of identity management; to discover reactions to and reuse of user-generated media; to re-find personal content; as a form of entertainment; and to reveal lost or forgotten content. Strategies vary according to motivation, and may differ markedly from typical information-seeking, with users looking deep into the results and using image search to identify content about themselves. We argue that two dimensions underpin ways of improving self-search: controllability and expectedness, and discuss what these dimensions imply for design.

In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily find information to a place where we also leave, share and keep it. This presents a fresh set of challenges for the management of personal information, which include how to underpin greater awareness and more control over digital belongings and other personally meaningful content that is hosted online. In the study reported here, we follow up on research that suggests a sense of ownership and control can be reinforced by federating online content as a virtual, single store; we do this by conducting interviews with 14 individuals about their Web-based content. Participants were asked to give the researchers a tour of online content that is personally meaningful to them; to perform a search for themselves in order to uncover additional content; and to respond to a series of design envisionments. We examine whether there is any value in an integrated personal archive that would automatically update and serve firstly, as a source of information regarding the content within it (e.g. where it is stored, who has the rights to it), and secondly, as a resource for crafting personal artefacts such as scrapbooks, CVs and gifts for others. Our analysis leads us to reject the concept of a single archive. Instead, we present a framework of five different types of online content, each of which has separate implications for personal information management.

The growth of online videos has spurred a concomitant increase in the storage, reuse, and remix of this content. As we gain more experience with video content, social norms about ownership have evolved accordingly, spelling out what people think is appropriate use of content that is not necessarily their own. We use a series of three studies, each centering on a different genre of recordings, to probe 634 participants' attitudes toward video storage, reuse, and remix; we also question participants about their own experiences with online video. The results allow us to characterize current practice and emerging social norms and to establish the relationship between the two. Hypotheticals borrowed from legal research are used as the primary vehicle for testing attitudes, and for identifying boundaries between socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

We studied how people use file sync and sharing services to better understand how early adopters conceptualize their interactions with the cloud. A survey of 106 users provided background information about current use of these cloud storage services and identified 19 people for in-depth interviews. Use cases described in the interviews revealed a hierarchy of concepts that participants needed to master to make full use of these services. Five pivotal concepts demonstrate that users make sense of the cloud as a: personal file repository, shared file repository, personal replicated file store, shared replicated file store, and synchronization mechanism that coordinates among replicas. We propose specific ways in which process transparency and interface scaffolding can help users build a more robust model of cloud services.

In this paper, we describe the design and use of Cimetric, a file synchronization application that supports scholarly collaboration. The system design incorporates results of earlier studies that suggest replicating content on a user's personal devices may have different characteristics than replicating content to share it with collaborators. To realize this distinction, Cimetric performs bi-level synchronization: it synchronizes local copies of a versioned repository among collaborators' computers, while it separately synchronizes private working files between each user's personal devices. Through a year's worth of in-house use of Cimetric in a variety of configurations, we were able to investigate key file synchronization issues, including the role of cloud storage given the ability to sync between peers; the strengths and weaknesses of a bi-level design; and which aspects of the synchronization process to reveal to users.

Social media, by its very nature, introduces questions about ownership. Ownership comes into play most crucially when we investigate how social media is saved or archived; how it is reused; and whether it can be removed or deleted. We investigate these social media ownership issues using a Mechanical Turk survey of Twitter users; the survey uses open-ended questions and statements of belief about realistic Twitter-based scenarios to give us a window onto current attitudes and beliefs. Our findings reveal that respondents take a liberal attitude toward saving and storing the tweets that they encounter. More caution is exercised with republishing the material, and still more with sharing the material among friends and associates. Respondents approach removal of this type of lightweight social media most cautiously. The material's provenance and the respondents' relationship to the material (whether they are the author or subject) has considerable bearing on what they feel they can do with it.

Docx2Go is a new framework to support editing of shared documents on mobile devices. Three high-level requirements influenced its design -- namely, the need to adapt content, especially textual content, on the fly according to the quality of the network connection and the form factor of each device; support for concurrent, uncoordinated editing on different devices, whose effects will later be merged on all devices in a convergent and consistent manner without sacrificing the semantics of the edits; and a flexible replication architecture that accommodates both device-to-device and cloud-mediated synchronization. Docx2Go supports on-the-go editing for XML documents, such as documents in Microsoft Word and other commonly used formats. It combines the best practices from content adaptation systems, weakly consistent replication systems, and collaborative editing systems, while extending the state of the art in each of these fields. The implementation of Docx2Go has been evaluated based on a workload drawn from Wikipedia.

Weakly consistent replication of data has become increasingly important both for loosely-coupled collections of personal devices and for large-scale infrastructure services. Unfortunately, automatic replication mechanisms are agnostic about the quality of the data they replicate. Inappropriate updates, whether malicious or simply the result of misuse, propagate automatically and quickly. The consequences may not be noticed until days later, when the corrupted data has been fully replicated, thereby deleting or overwriting all traces of the valid data. In this sort of situation, it can be hard or impossible to restore an entire distributed system to a clean state without losing data and disrupting users.

People frequently must sort through large sets of documents to identify useful materials, for example, when they look through web search results. This document triage process may involve both reading and organizing, possibly using different applications for each activity. Users' interests may be inferred from what they read and how they interact with individual documents; these interests may in turn be used as a basis for identifying other documents or document elements of potential interest within the set. To most effectively identify related documents of interest, activity data must be collected from all applications used in document triage. In this paper we present a common framework (the Interest Profile Manager) for collecting and analyzing user interest. We also present models for detecting user interest based on reading activity alone, on organizing activity alone, and on combined reading and organizing activity. A study comparing document value calculated using the different models shows that incorporating interest information from both reading and organizing activity better predicted users' valuation of documents. This difference was statistically significant when compared to using reading activity alone.

As part of a focus on electronic publications, we undertook an exploratory study of how people saved and used the information they encountered while reading. In particular, we wanted to understand the role of clipping and whether it would be a necessary form of interaction with electronic publications. We interviewed 20 diverse individuals at home and at work, bringing together narrative accounts and physical and digital examples to investigate how people currently collect and use clippings from their everyday reading. All study participants had examples of materials they had deliberately saved from periodicals, ranging from ads torn from newspapers and URLs received in email messages to large stacks of magazines. Participants rarely read periodicals specifically to clip but rather recognized items of interest when they were encountered. The work highlights the importance of encountering information as an activity distinct from task-focused browsing and searching and reveals design implications for online reading and clipping technologies.

Presentations frequently include material appropriated from external sources; they may incorporate tabular data from published reports, photographs from books, or clip art from purchased collections.With the growing use of the World-Wide Web to disseminate information, there is the emerging potential for a new style of presentation: one that interprets and organizes materials produced by others and published on-line.Authoring such presentations requires the analysis of the source information.However, current presentation authoring software is designed to support traditional presentations, where analysis is assumed a separate task at best supported by separate software.This paper discusses experiences with using VIKI, a system designed to support information analysis, for the authoring of such presentations.VIKI includes a spatial parser to recognize implicit spatial structure generated during analysis.This paper describes how initial experiences with use for path authoring led to VIKI enhancements, including the adaptation of implicit spatial structure recognition for the creation of presentations.

Many interfaces allow users to manipulate graphical objects, icons representing underlying data or the data themselves, against a spatial backdrop or canvas. Users take advantage of the flexibility offered by spatial manipulation to create evolving lightweight structures. We have been investigating these implicit organizations so we can support user activities like information management or exploratory analysis. To accomplish this goal, we have analyzed the spatial structures people create in diverse settings and tasks, developed algorithms to detect the common structures we identified in our survey, and experimented with new facilities based on recognized structure. Similar recognitionbased functionality can be used within many common applications, providing more support for users ’ activities with less attendant overhead.