Designing Collective Action Systems for User Privacy
Author(s)
Wu, Yuxi
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Abstract
People feel concerned, angry, and frustrated when subjected to data breaches, surveillance, and other privacy-violating experiences with large institutions. However, they also feel helpless to effect change. Collective action may empower groups of people affected by such experiences to jointly voice their stories of lived harm and demand redress.
In this thesis, I show that considering users’ privacy concerns and lived harms on a collective level can empower users through allowing them to (1) understand they are not alone in their experiences; (2) recognize that their harms are significant and measurable; and (3) be equipped with the appropriate tools to regularly speak out about these harms. I do this through a series of work in which I create a unified collective voice of privacy concerns, interpret the unified voice in existing legal lenses of harm, and imagine formal ways to measure and respond to privacy harms. Reflecting upon my findings from this work, I discuss how the current lack of a collective action framing within the usable privacy and security field has led to the community not addressing multiple long-standing problems, and how my work can inform future directions of research in the field.
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Date
2024-04-27
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Text
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Dissertation