Pamela J. Wisniewski

Preventative vs. "Reactive": How Parental Mediation Influences Teens' Social Media Privacy Behaviors

Through an empirical, secondary analysis of 588 teens (ages 12 - 17) and one of their parents living in the USA, we present useful insights into how parental privacy concerns for their teens and different parental mediation strategies (direct intervention versus active mediation) influence teen privacy concerns and privacy risk-taking and risk-coping privacy behaviors in social media. Our results suggest that the use of direct intervention by itself may have a suppressive effect on teens, reducing their exposure to online risks but also their ability to engage with others online and to learn how to effectively cope with online risks. Therefore, it may be beneficial for parents to combine active mediation with direct intervention so that they can protect their teens from severe online risks while empowering teens to engage with others online and learn to make good online privacy choices.

Resilience Mitigates the Negative Effects of Adolescent Internet Addiction and Online Risk Exposure

We cannot fully protect adolescents from experiencing online risks; however, we can aim to better understand how online risk experiences impact teens, factors that contribute to or prevent teens from exposure to risk, as well as factors that can protect teens from psychological harm in spite of online risk exposure. Through a web-based survey study of 75 adolescents in the US, we develop and empirically validate a theoretical model of adolescent resilience in the presence of online risks. We show evidence that resilience is a key factor in protecting teens from experiencing online risks, even when teens exhibit high levels of Internet addiction. Resilience also neutralizes the negative psychological effects associated with Internet addiction and online risk exposure. Therefore, we emphasize the importance of design solutions that foster teen resilience and strength building, as opposed to solutions targeted toward parents that often focus on restriction and risk prevention.

Facebook apps and tagging: The trade-off between personal privacy and engaging with friends

The use of social network sites offers many potential social benefits, but also raises privacy concerns and challenges for users. The trade‐off users have to make between using sites such as Facebook to connect with their friends versus protecting their personal privacy is not well understood. Furthermore, very little behavioral research has focused on how personal privacy concerns are related to information disclosures made by ones friends. Our survey study of 116 Facebook users shows that engaging with friends through tagging activity and third‐party application use is associated with higher levels of personal Facebook usage and a stronger emotional attachment to Facebook. However, users who have high levels of personal privacy concern and perceive a lack of effectiveness in Facebooks privacy policies tend to engage less frequently in tagging and app activities with friends, respectively. Our model and results explore illustrate the complexity of the trade‐off between privacy concerns, engaging with friends through tagging and apps, and Facebook usage.

Dear Diary: Teens Reflect on Their Weekly Online Risk Experiences

In our study, 68 teens spend two months reflecting on their weekly online experiences and report 207 separate risk events involving information breaches, online harassment, sexual solicitations, and exposure to explicit content. We conduct a structured, qualitative analysis to characterize the salient dimensions of their risk experiences, such as severity, level of agency, coping strategies, and whether the teens felt like the situation had been resolved. Overall, we found that teens can potentially benefit from lower risk online situations, which allow them to develop crucial interpersonal skills, such as boundary setting, conflict resolution, and empathy. We can also use the dimensions of risk described in this paper to identify potentially harmful risk trajectories before they become high-risk situations. Our end goal is to find a way to empower and protect teens so that they can benefit from online engagement.

Framing and Measuring Multi-dimensional Interpersonal Privacy Preferences of Social Networking Site Users

In this paper, we focus on interpersonal boundary regulation as a means to balance the tradeoffs between engaging with others and protecting one’s privacy on social networking sites (SNSs). We examine boundary regulation from the combined perspectives of SNS design and end user behavior; we conduct a feature-oriented domain analysis of five popular SNS interfaces and 21 semi-structured SNS user interviews. We use this information to construct a taxonomy of 10 types of interpersonal boundaries SNS users regulate to manage their privacy preferences. We then develop and validate scales to operationalize these 10 boundary types to measure the multi-dimensional nature of SNS users’ privacy preferences by using a sample of 581 Facebook users. Our taxonomy provides a theoretical foundation for conceptualizing SNS user privacy, and our scales provide a more robust way to measure SNS users’ multi-faceted privacy preferences.

The Future of Networked Privacy: Challenges and Opportunities

Building on recent work in privacy management and disclosure in networked spaces, this two-day workshop examines networked privacy challenges from a broader perspective by (1) identifying the most important issues researchers will need to address in the next decade and (2) working to create actionable solutions for these privacy issues. This workshop comes at a critical time for organizations, researchers, and consumers, as content-sharing applications soar in popularity and more privacy and security vulnerabilities emerge. Workshop participants and organizers will work together to develop a guiding framework for the community that highlights the future challenges and opportunities of networked privacy.

Adolescent Online Safety: Moving Beyond Formative Evaluations to Designing Solutions for the Future

We present a comprehensive and structured review of 132 peer-reviewed publications between the years of 2008 and 2015 to inform Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and interaction designers about the current and multi-disciplinary knowledge on the topic of adolescent online safety and risks. Overall, we found that the existing literature has deeply studied the phenomena around adolescent online safety through an in-depth examination of the prevalence, perceptions, behaviors, characteristics, and outcomes associated with various online risk experiences. However, very few studies have moved beyond formative evaluations that inform design to novel design interventions or summative evaluations of new designs that serve to effectively change the status quo.

Multiwave: Doppler Effect Based Gesture Recognition in Multiple Dimensions

We constructed an acoustic, gesture-based recognition system called Multiwave, which leverages the Doppler Effect to translate multidimensional movements into user interface commands. Our system only requires the use of two speakers and a microphone to be operational. Since these components are already built in to most end user systems, our design makes gesture-based input more accessible to a wider range of end users. By generating a known high frequency tone from multiple speakers and detecting movement using changes in the sound waves, we are able to calculate a Euclidean representation of hand velocity that is then used for more natural gesture recognition and thus, more meaningful interaction mappings. We present the results of a user study of Multiwave to evaluate recognition rates for different gestures and report accuracy rates comparable to or better than the current state of the art. We also report subjective user feedback and some lessons learned from our system that provide additional insight for future applications of multidimensional gesture recognition.

Bridging a Bridge: Bringing Two HCI Communities Together

ACM SIGCHI is the largest association for professionals in HCI that bridges computer science, information science, as well as the social and psychological sciences. Meanwhile, a parallel HCI community was formed in 2001 within the Association of Information Systems (AIS SIGHCI) community. While some researchers have already bridged these two HCI sub-disciplines, the history and core values of these respective fields are quite different, offering new insights for how we can move forward together to sustain the future of HCI research. The main goal of this workshop is to begin building a bridge between these two communities to maximize the relevance, rigor, and generalizability of HCI research.

Research Ethics Town Hall Meeting

As technology and data access continue to evolve, research ethics in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and social computing are becoming increasingly complex. Despite increasing interest among researchers, there is still a lack of consistent community norms around ethical gray areas. One charge of the SIGCHI ethics committee is to help develop these norms by facilitating open conversations with different stakeholders. This panel will be an opportunity to develop a collective understanding of diverse perspectives on ethics, and to gather input from the GROUP research community around the ethical challenges we face as researchers who study social and collaborative computing systems and those who use these systems.