Computational and Data Sciences Seminar Series

Speaker: Nora McDonald, GMU, School of Computing, Department of Information Science and Technology

Title: Beyond app-centric privacy: Privacy vulnerability in an ever more complex landscape

Abstract: The emphasis of technology privacy protection has primarily been on technical solutions in a narrow sense rather than more broadly framed to look at a highly complex landscape of risk that emerges because of technology and structural barriers. The result has been some misalignment between the types of privacy literacy that is offered as well as the resources explicitly made available to people and the way they actually enact their own privacy protection—often based on the strategies they have available or are able to devise themselves. The resulting efforts tend to be ad hoc and improvisational, and largely low-tech. My work explores these efforts, and how to provide people with feasible strategies and a level of privacy “literacy” that goes beyond a tool-centered education to encompass the context and complex challenges that people face. It considers the many facets of privacy protection that are necessary to achieve a more wholistic proficiency, given the numerous and highly varied threat vectors to which people are exposed. My work focuses on a range of contexts in which people are acutely vulnerable to privacy risks, including public libraries, intimate partner violence, and reproductive health.

For Zoom link contact Robert Axtell