SPICE Speaker Yao Li Presents On Cultural & Social Context Impacts on User Privacy Management

On January 20th, Indiana University’s Security & Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SPICE) center hosted Ph.D. candidate Yao Li,  from the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine as a SPICE Colloquium speaker. Delivering her talk entitled The Impact of Cultural and Social Contexts on Users’ Privacy Management, Li presented her work which intersects with various security informatics areas including network security, social computing, human computing interaction, and cross-cultural studies to look at social and cultural contexts in order to understand how users shape their security choices and behaviors.

In her talk, Li looked at different cultures who have divergent cultural experiences of the individual and the communal. Her studies seek an empirical knowledge of how users are impacted and then apply those understandings to privacy designs that help users have better control over their privacy and security through options and education that are better matched to individual users. As she states in her talk abstract, her research goals are:

1) to empirically explore the impact of cultural and social contexts on users’ privacy management, and 2) to generate implications for privacy designs that support users to achieve better privacy and security, adapt to contextual differences, reduce the technical effort required from end users and go beyond the current “one-size fits all” privacy approach.

Yao Li received her master’s degree in information management from iSchool at Syracuse University and her bachelor’s degree in e-commerce from International Business School at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 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), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, and Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.

A video of her talk is available online below: