This research will drive global digital privacy innovation by developing a fundamental understanding of the privacy challenges faced by novice technology users in non-Western contexts and designing empirically-driven and theoretically-grounded technical interventions that transform existing knowledge of human-centered privacy. Although access to digital technologies offers great potential benefits, it also puts people at risk of digital security and privacy attacks, and novice technology users in non-Western contexts may lack the technological knowledge and experience required to understand the risks and protect their personal data. Moreover, a growing amount of evidence suggests that (1) these populations face a range of new and interesting digital privacy challenges that result from their different social, cultural, and religious contexts, and (2) the current design of mobile devices, and the privacy mechanisms that come with them, are primarily driven by Western values and do not adequately address the needs of these diverse populations. This research will help US corporations to be more competitive in the global technology market and enable developers to create privacy-preserving systems that respect different cultures and values.
The research agenda has four primary aims. The first will collect empirical data through qualitative fieldwork that provides a deep understanding of people's usage patterns, privacy concerns, and priorities. The second will analyze this empirical data to generate privacy threat models and assess the relevance, severity, and likelihood of different privacy attacks. The third will use participatory design, software development, and field deployments to create and evaluate novel technical interventions that improve digital privacy by supporting alternative device usage models and increasing people's understanding and awareness of privacy threats. Finally, the fourth will integrate these research efforts into a broad set of education and outreach activities that amplify the project's impact on academia, industry, and society. This human-centered research advances existing knowledge of digital privacy and technology use in non-Western societies, which will benefit researchers in computer science, security and privacy, human-computer interaction (HCI), global development, and others. The specific intellectual contributions include: (1) developing a fundamental understanding of the privacy challenges faced by novice users in non-Western contexts, (2) identifying new threat models and analyzing the privacy attack landscape, (3) designing and evaluating novel technical interventions that improve digital privacy for diverse populations, and (4) contributing empirical data and design ideas that initiate a new field of innovation at the intersection of HCI for development and computer security and privacy.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
