AI companion chatbots are increasingly popular with teens. While these interactions are entertaining, they also risk overuse that can potentially disrupt offline daily life. We examined how adolescents describe reliance on AI companions, mapping their experiences onto behavioral addiction frameworks and exploring pathways to disengagement, by analyzing 318 Reddit posts made by users who self-disclosed as 13-17 years old on the Character.AI subreddit. We found teens often begin using chatbots for support or creative play, but these activities can deepen into strong attachments marked by conflict, withdrawal, tolerance, relapse, and mood regulation. Reported consequences include sleep loss, academic decline, and strained real-world connections. Disengagement commonly arises when teens recognize harm, re-engage with offline life, or encounter restrictive platform changes. We highlight specific risks of character-based companion chatbots based on teens’ perspectives and introduce a design framework (CARE) for guidance for safer systems and setting directions for future teen-centered research.

Cybergrooming is a form of online abuse that threatens teens’ mental health and physical safety. Yet, most prior work has focused on detecting perpetrators’ behaviors, leaving a limited understanding of how teens might respond to such unwanted advances. To address this gap, we conducted an online survey with 74 participants—51 parents and 23 teens—who responded to simulated cybergrooming scenarios in two ways: responses that they think would make teens more vulnerable or resilient to unwanted sexual advances. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we identified four types of vulnerable responses (encouraging escalation, accepting an advance, displaying vulnerability, and negating risk concern) and four types of protective strategies (setting boundaries, directly declining, signaling risk awareness, and leveraging avoidance techniques). As the cybergrooming risk escalated, both vulnerable responses and protective strategies showed a corresponding progression. This study contributes a teen-centered understanding of cybergrooming, a labeled dataset, and a stage-based taxonomy of perceived protective strategies, while offering implications for educational programs and sociotechnical interventions.

Understanding how social interactions affect privacy management is important in today’s digital landscape. We are investigating collective management of privacy and security through a mobile application, CO-oPS, that allows people to view and discuss each other’s app privacy settings within a community of users. Sixteen small, self-organized groups, totaling 81 participants, used the app over a four-week period. Data collection included pre- and post-study surveys measuring privacy perceptions (Community Belonging, Self-Efficacy, Community Collective Efficacy) along with in-app behavioral logs (messaging and viewing activity). In this paper, we present a social network analysis of our field study data, exploring the effects of group formation and engagement on building privacy and security efficacy through CO-oPS interactions. Our analysis reveals that while privacy perceptions were not initially homophilous, they grew more similar over time. Notably, proactively messaging others in the app enhanced personal privacy management confidence. Our results demonstrate the nuanced ways that groups can influence each other in addressing security and privacy needs.

Youth, while tech-savvy and highly active on social media, are still vulnerable to online privacy and security risks. Therefore, it is critical to understand how they negotiate and manage social connections versus protecting themselves in online contexts. In this work, we conducted a thematic analysis of 1,318 private conversations on Instagram from 149 youth aged 13-21 to understand the digital privacy and security topics they discussed, if and how they engaged in risky privacy behaviors, and how they balanced the benefits and risks (i.e., privacy calculus) of making these decisions. Overall, youth were forthcoming when broaching a wide range of topics on digital privacy and security, ranging from password management and account access challenges to shared experiences of being victims of privacy risks. However, they also openly engaged in risky behaviors, such as sharing personal account information with peers and even perpetrating privacy and security risks against others. Nonetheless, we found many of these behaviors could be explained by the unique ''privacy calculus'' of youth, where they often prioritized social benefits over potential risks; for instance, youth often shared account credentials with peers to foster social connection and affirmation. As such, we provide a nuanced understanding of youth decision-making regarding digital security and privacy, highlighting both positive behaviors, tensions, and points of concern. We encourage future research to continue to challenge the potentially untrue narratives regarding youth and their digital privacy and security to unpack the nuance of their privacy calculus that may differ from that of adults.

We analyzed 1,596 sub-conversations within 451 direct message (DM) conversations from 67 teens (ages 13-17) who engaged in private discussions about body image on Instagram. Our findings show that teens often receive support when sharing struggles with negative body image, participate in criticism when engaging in body-shaming, and are met with appreciation when promoting positive body image. Additionally, these types of disclosures and responses varied based on whether the conversations were one-on-one or group-based. We found that sharing struggles and receiving support most often occurred in one-on-one conversations, while body shaming and negative interactions often occurred in group settings. A key insight of the study is that private social media settings can significantly influence how teens discuss and respond to body image issues. Based on these findings, we propose design guidelines for social media platforms that can foster positive interactions around body image, ultimately creating a healthier and more supportive online environment for teens struggling with body image concerns.

Youth implicated in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, as well as those with an incarcerated parent, are considered the most vulnerable Children in Need of Services (CHINS). We identified 1,160 of these at-risk youth (ages 13-17) who sought support via an online peer support platform to understand their adverse childhood experiences and explore how the internet played a role in providing an outlet for support, as well as potentially facilitating risks. We first analyzed posts from 1,160 youth who self-identified as CHINS while sharing about their adverse experiences. Then, we retrieved all 239,929 posts by these users to identify salient topics within their support-seeking posts: 1) Urges to self-harm due to social drama, 2) desire for social connection, 3) struggles with family, and 4) substance use and sexual risks. We found that the internet often helped facilitate these problems; for example, the desperation for social connection often led to meeting unsafe people online, causing additional trauma. Family members and other unsafe people used the internet to perpetrate cyberabuse, while CHINS themselves leveraged online channels to engage in illegal and risky behavior. Our study calls for tailored support systems that address the unique needs of CHINS to promote safe online spaces and foster resilience to break the cycle of adversity. Empowering CHINS requires amplifying their voices and acknowledging the challenges they face as a result of their adverse childhood experiences.

We conducted a 4-week field study with 101 smartphone users who self-organized into 22 small groups of family, friends, and neighbors to use "CO-oPS," a mobile app for co-managing mobile privacy and security. We differentiated between those who provided oversight (i.e., caregivers) and those who did not (i.e., caregivees) to examine differential effects on their experiences and behaviors while using CO-oPS. Caregivers reported higher power use, community trust, belonging, collective efficacy, and self-efficacy than caregivees. Both groups' self-efficacy and collective efficacy for mobile privacy and security increased after using CO-oPS. However, this increase was significantly stronger for caregivees. Our research demonstrates how community-based approaches can benefit people who need additional help managing their digital privacy and security. We provide recommendations to support community-based oversight for managing privacy and security within communities of different roles and skills.

We collected and analyzed Instagram direct messages (DMs) from 173 youth aged 13–21 (including 86 LGBTQ+ youth). We examined youth’s risk-flagged social media trace data with their self-reported mental health outcomes to examine how the differing online experiences of LGBTQ+ youth compare with their heterosexual counterparts. We found that LGBTQ+ youth experienced significantly more high-risk online interactions compared to heterosexual youth. LGBTQ+ youth reported overall poorer mental health, with online harassment specifically amplifying Self-Harm and Injury. LGBTQ+ youth’s mental well-being linked positively to sexual messages, unlike heterosexual youth. Qualitatively, we found that most of the risk-flagged messages of LGBTQ+ youth were sexually motivated; however, a silver lining was that they sought support for their sexual identity from peers on the platform. The study highlights the importance of tailored online safety and inclusive design for LGBTQ+ youth, with implications for CHI community advancements in fostering a supportive online environments.

The debate on whether social media has a net positive or negative effect on youth is ongoing. Therefore, we conducted a thematic analysis on 2,061 posts made by 1,038 adolescents aged 15-17 on an online peer-support platform to investigate the ways in which these teens discussed popular social media platforms in their posts and to identify differences in their experiences across platforms. Our findings revealed four main emergent themes for the ways in which social media was discussed: 1) Sharing negative experiences or outcomes of social media use (58%, n = 1,095), 2) Attempts to connect with others (45%, n = 922), 3) Highlighting the positive side of social media use (20%, n = 409), and 4) Seeking information (20%, n = 491). Overall, while sharing about negative experiences was more prominent, teens also discussed balanced perspectives of connection-seeking, positive experiences, and information support on social media that should not be discounted. Moreover, we found statistical significance for how these experiences differed across social media platforms. For instance, teens were most likely to seek romantic relationships on Snapchat and self-promote on YouTube. Meanwhile, Instagram was mentioned most frequently for body shaming, and Facebook was the most commonly discussed platform for privacy violations (mostly from parents). The key takeaway from our study is that the benefits and drawbacks of teens' social media usage can co-exist and net effects (positive or negative) can vary across different teens across various contexts. As such, we advocate for mitigating the negative experiences and outcomes of social media use as voiced by teens, to improve, rather than limit or restrict, their overall social media experience. We do this by taking an affordance perspective that aims to promote the digital well-being and online safety of youth "by design."

We conducted 26 co-design interviews with 50 smarthome device owners to understand the perceived benefits, drawbacks, and design considerations for developing a smarthome system that facilitates co-monitoring with emergency contacts who live outside of one’s home. Participants felt that such a system would help ensure their personal safety, safeguard from material loss, and give them peace of mind by ensuring quick response and verifying potential threats. However, they also expressed concerns regarding privacy, overburdening others, and other potential threats, such as unauthorized access and security breaches. To alleviate these concerns, participants designed flexible and granular access control and fail-safe back-up features. Our study reveals why peer-based co-monitoring of smarthomes for emergencies may be beneficial but also difficult to implement. Based on the insights gained from our study, we provide recommendations for designing technologies that facilitate such co-monitoring while mitigating its risks.

Modern text-to-speech engines can be an effective speech choice for embodied virtual pedagogical agents. However, it is not known how synthesized accents influence learning outcomes and perceptions of the agent. In this paper, we conducted a between-subjects experiment (n=60) to determine the effect of a pedagogical agent’s machine synthesized text-to-speech accent (United States English or Indian English) on learning outcomes and perceptions of the agent for students in the United States. Our results indicate that learner gender interacts with synthesized speech accent to significantly affect learning outcomes and perceptions of the agent. Our results reveal that a foreign synthetic speech accent may affect the learning outcomes of female university students (n=30), but not male university students (n=30). Finally, our results indicate that learner gender interacts with synthesized speech accent to affect perceptions of the pedagogical agent’s human-likeness. We provide novel insights on the differences between male and female learners for interactions with pedagogical agents with synthetic TTS accents.

Our research aims to highlight and alleviate the complex tensions around online safety, privacy, and smartphone usage in families so that parents and teens can work together to better manage mobile privacy and security-related risks. We developed a mobile application ("app") for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") and had parents and teens assess whether it would be applicable for use with their families. CO-oPS is an Android app that allows a group of users to co-monitor the apps installed on one another's devices and the privacy permissions granted to those apps. We conducted a study with 19 parent-teen (ages 13-17) pairs to understand how they currently managed mobile safety and app privacy within their family and then had them install, use, and evaluate the CO-oPS app. We found that both parents and teens gave little consideration to online safety and privacy before installing new apps or granting privacy permissions. When using CO-oPS, participants liked how the app increased transparency into one another's devices in a way that facilitated communication, but were less inclined to use features for in-app messaging or to hide apps from one another. Key themes related to power imbalances between parents and teens surfaced that made co-management challenging. Parents were more open to collaborative oversight than teens, who felt that it was not their place to monitor their parents, even though both often believed parents lacked the technological expertise to monitor themselves. Our study sheds light on why collaborative practices for managing online safety and privacy within families may be beneficial but also quite difficult to implement in practice. We provide recommendations for overcoming these challenges based on the insights gained from our study.

Managing digital privacy and security is often a collaborative process, where groups of individuals work together to share information and give one another advice. Yet, this collaborative process is not always reciprocal or equally shared. In many cases, individuals with more expertise help others without receiving help in return. Therefore, we studied the phenomenon of "Tech Caregiving" by surveying 20 groups (112 individuals) comprised of friends, family members, and/or co-workers who identified at least one member of their group as a someone who provides informal technical support to the people they know. We found that tech caregivers reported significantly higher levels of power use and self-efficacy for digital privacy and security, compared to tech caregivees. However, caregivers and caregivees did not differ based on their self-reportedcommunity collective-efficacy for collaboratively managing privacy and security together as a group. This finding demonstrates the importance of tech caregiving and community belonging in building community collective efficacy for digital privacy and security. We also found that caregivers and caregivees most often communicated via text message or phone when coordinating support, which was most frequently needed when troubleshooting or setting up new devices. Meanwhile, discussions specific to privacy and security represented only a small fraction of the issues for which participants gave or received tech care. Thus, we conclude that educating tech caregivers on how to provide privacy and security-focused support, as well as designing technologies that facilitate such support, has the potential to create positive networks effects towards the collective management of digital privacy and security.