Woodrow Hartzog

Boundary regulation in social media

The management of group context in socially mediating technologies is an important challenge for the design community. To better understand how users manage group context, we explored the practice of multiple profile management in social media. In doing so, we observed creative and opportunistic strategies for group context management. We found that multiple profile maintenance is motivated by four factors: privacy, identity, utility, and propriety. Drawing on these motives, we observe a continuum of boundary regulation behaviors: pseudonymity, practical obscurity, and transparent separation. Based on these findings, we encourage designers of group context management systems to more broadly consider motives and practices of group separations in social media. Group context management systems should be privacy-enhancing, but a singular focus on privacy overlooks a range of other group context management practices.

Beyond sunglasses and spray paint: A taxonomy of surveillance countermeasures

The rapid decline in size and cost of networked sensors combined with increased incentives for use including monitoring physical fitness, improving public safety, increasing security, and adding convenience is causing the physical and online worlds to become heavily instrumented. Some welcome such developments, but others seek to retain privacy, often by focusing on countering the sensors themselves. Scholars have begun to consider surveillance countermeasures as a stand-alone area of research. However, a scholarly taxonomy useful for critical analysis and systematic countermeasure development is lacking. In this paper we provide such a taxonomy illustrated with example countermeasures that have been successfully employed.

The New Price to Play: Are Passive Online Media Users Bound By Terms of Use?

When individuals turn on the television, listen to the radio, or purchase newspapers, they are not forming contractual relationships. Yet, almost without exception, online readers, viewers and listeners are required to enter into “terms of use” contracts. These ubiquitous agreements are generally unfavorable for the user in areas of intellectual property rights and privacy. In addition, the terms often restrict users’ behavior and their ability to litigate any disputes with a Web site. In analyzing the implications of contracts for Web site users, this article examines whether courts have recognized a distinction between online consumers, interactive users, and “passive media users”—online readers, listeners or viewers who engage in little, if any, of the activity traditionally required to form contracts. Case law reveals a frequent de facto exemption from online agreements for passive media users, but not highly interactive users. This exemption could be formally recognized to benefit all parties to a contract.

The anonymization debate should be about risk, not perfection

Focusing on the process of anonymity rather than pursuing the unattainable goal of guaranteed safety.

Facebook’s emotional contagion study and the ethical problem of co-opted identity in mediated environments where users lack control

We argue a main but underappreciated reason why the Facebook emotional contagion experiment is ethically problematic is that it co-opted user data in a way that violated identity-based norms and exploited the vulnerability of those disclosing on social media who are unable to control how personal information is presented in this technologically mediated environment.

Confronting automated law enforcement

The time has come for a cohesive approach to automated law enforcement. The ubiquity of sensors, advances in computerized analysis and robotics, and widespread adoption of networked technologies have paved the way for the combination of sensor systems with law enforcement algorithms and punishment feedback loops. While in the past, law enforcement was manpower intensive and moderated by the discretion of the police officer on the beat, automated systems scale efficiently, allow meticulous enforcement of the law, provide rapid dispatch of punishment and offer financial incentives to law enforcement agencies, governments, and purveyors of these systems. Unfortunately, laws were not created with such broad attempts at enforcement in mind and the future portends significant harms to society where many types of violations, particularly minor infractions, can be enforced with unprecedented rigor.