The Impact of Social and Cultural Contexts on Users' Privacy Management

Abstract:
Context plays a critical role in shaping users’ privacy attitudes and behaviors. Previous privacy studies mostly focus on physical and technical contexts, such environmental cues and data collection methods. The impact of social and cultural contexts has not been sufficiently addressed. Moreover, existing privacy design mostly focuses on providing users with comprehensive controls over what information to disclose and on educating users about the implications of disclosure, which overloads users with too many technical tasks and rarely changes for different situations without users’ intervention. To address these issues, my research has focused on:  1) empirically exploring the social and cultural factors in users’ privacy management, and 2) providing implications for privacy designs that supports users to achieve better privacy and security, adapts to contextual differences, reduces the technical effort required from end users and goes beyond the current “one-size fits all” privacy approach.  In this talk, I will present my research on how social and cultural contexts impact users’ privacy management in their interaction with different technologies. I will also discuss promising future directions that I am excited to explore.

Bio:
Yao Li is an assistant professor in the School of Modeling, Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. She received her Ph.D. degree in information and computer sciences from the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine in June 2019, under the supervision of Dr. Alfred Kobsa. Her research lies at the intersection of privacy and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Specifically, her research concerns the impact of social and cultural contexts on users’ privacy management. Her research goals are to enhance the understanding of users’ privacy attitudes and behaviors in their interaction with technologies, and to explore how to design better systems to support users' privacy management. She has published in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, and Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.