Emilee Rader - Conceptualizing Digital Privacy as a Social Dilemma

Abstract: How might conceptualizing the widespread collection and use of personal data as a social dilemma enable a change in how digital privacy is managed? In this talk I will present my recent work to discover ways to help people manage the privacy social dilemma that arises when algorithms in computing systems make new inferences from data collected to help the system work better, but that users might not want to disclose. I will present results from two projects focusing on the extent to which people are already aware of the inferences these systems are making, and what they believe the systems are able to know about them. I will also argue that the "derived data" created by these systems can be framed as a common-pool resource, which shifts the focus for solutions to information privacy problems from the dominant self-management model to a collective governance model.

Emilee Rader is an Associate Professor and AT&T Scholar in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. Her research addresses problems that arise at the intersection of people, technology, and information in socio-technical systems. Dr. Rader earned her PhD from the University of Michigan School of Information and spent two years at Northwestern University in the Department of Communication Studies, where she was a recipient of the highly competitive Computing Innovation post-doctoral fellowship award from the Computing Research Association. She also has a professional Master's degree from the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and worked with an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Motorola Labs in the early 2000’s designing and evaluating applications for mobile technologies. Her work has been funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation, and she primarily publishes in human-computer interaction and usable security and privacy venues.