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Recent research and articles in popular press have raised concerns about the privacy risks that smart home devices can create for incidental users—people who encounter smart home devices that are owned, controlled, and configured by someone else. In this work, we present the results of a user-centered investigation that explores incidental users’ experiences and the tensions that arise between device owners and incidental users. We conducted five focus group sessions through which we identified specific contexts in which someone might encounter other people’s smart home devices and the main concerns device owners and incidental users have in such situations. We used these findings to inform the design of a survey instrument, which we deployed to a demographically representative sample of 386 adults in the United States. Through this survey, we can better understand which contexts and concerns are most bothersome and how often device owners are willing to accommodate incidental users’ privacy preferences. We found some surprising trends in terms of what people are most worried about and what actions they are willing to take. For example, while participants who did not own devices themselves were often uncomfortable imagining them in their own homes, they were not as concerned about being affected by such devices in homes that they entered as part of their jobs. Participants showed interest in privacy solutions that might have a technical implementation component, but also frequently envisioned an open dialogue between incidental users and device owners to negotiate privacy accommodations.

Many organizations in the developing world (e.g., NGOs), include digital data collection in their workflow. Data collected can include information that may be considered sensitive, such as medical or socioeconomic data, and which could be affected by computer security attacks or unintentional mishandling. The attitudes and practices of organizations collecting data have implications for confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data. This work, a collaboration between computer security and ICTD researchers, explores security and privacy attitudes, practices, and needs within organizations that use Open Data Kit (ODK), a prominent digital data collection platform. We conduct a detailed threat modeling exercise to inform our view on potential security threats, and then conduct and analyze a survey and interviews with technology experts in these organizations to ground this analysis in real deployment experiences. We then reflect upon our results, drawing lessons for both organizations collecting data and for tool developers.

Social media are a potentially valuable source of situational awareness information during crisis events. Consistently, "digital volunteers" and others are coming together to filter and process this data into usable resources, often coordinating their work within distributed online groups. However, current tools and practices are frequently unable to keep up with the speed and volume of incoming data during large events. Through contextual interviews with emergency response professionals and digital volunteers, this research examines the ad hoc, collaborative practices that have emerged to help process this data and outlines strategies for supporting and leveraging these efforts in future designs. We argue for solutions that align with current group values, work practices, volunteer motivations, and organizational structures, but also allow these groups to increase the scale and efficiency of their operations.

Many organizations in the developing world (e.g., NGOs), include digital data collection in their workflow. Data collected can include information that may be considered sensitive, such as medical or socioeconomic data, and which could be affected by computer security attacks or unintentional mishandling. The attitudes and practices of organizations collecting data have implications for confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data. This work, a collaboration between computer security and ICTD researchers, explores security and privacy attitudes, practices, and needs within organizations that use Open Data Kit (ODK), a prominent digital data collection platform. We conduct a detailed threat modeling exercise to inform our view on potential security threats, and then conduct and analyze a survey and interviews with technology experts in these organizations to ground this analysis in real deployment experiences. We then reflect upon our results, drawing lessons for both organizations collecting data and for tool developers. CCS Concepts •Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; Systems security; •Information systems → Information systems applications;

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Smartphone-based contact-tracing apps are a promising solution to help scale up the conventional contact-tracing process. However, low adoption rates is a major issue that prevents these apps from achieving their full potential. In this paper, we present a national-scale survey experiment (N = 1963) in the U.S. to investigate the effects of app design choices and individual differences on COVID-19 contact-tracing app adoption intentions. We found that individual differences such as prosocialness, COVID-19 risk perceptions, general privacy concerns, technology readiness, and demographic factors played a more important role than app design choices such as decentralized design vs. centralized design, location use, app providers, and the presentation of security risks. Certain app designs could exacerbate the different preferences in different subpopulations which may lead to an inequality of acceptance to certain app design choices (e.g., developed by state health authorities vs. a large tech company) among different groups of people (e.g., people living in rural areas vs. people living in urban areas). Our mediation analysis showed that one's perception of the public health benefits offered by the app and the adoption willingness of other people had a larger effect in explaining the observed effects of app design choices and individual differences than one's perception of the app's security and privacy risks. With these findings, we discuss practical implications on the design, marketing, and deployment of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps in the U.S.

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