As smartphones and other personal devices have become ubiquitous, we have made some assumptions as researchers about the ownership of devices, their usage, and how these patterns influence how we understand device affordances, and information privacy and security. In this talk, I will share field experiences that have led us to revisit some of the settled maxims regarding shared devices, multiple device use, and even multiple SIM usage. This opens the space to discuss device ownership complexities, financial impetus, and other externalities that complicate our understanding of user risks. I will showcase how these risks are represented through examples of how technology-related terms and conditions documents are followed, how they reveal malicious compliance, how they are useful to measure ignorance of their existence, and how they are breached–highlighting exploitation disparities where marginalized users are often the ones who face the brunt of these actions. The subsequent choices users make to mitigate their risks and recover from harm will also touch on the intricacies of how marginalized users leverage their wisdom to engage with technology and how their knowledge can provide important guidance on how we can audit current technology and envision future technologies, together with the design implications and emerging ethical tensions.
Lindah Kotut is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington’s Information School. Dr. Kotut’s research is at the intersection of human computer interaction, indigenous Knowledge and cybersecurity. She studies how people tell stories both online and offline, and the role that technology plays in the telling: especially of communities that do not have equitable access to storytelling tools and technology. Dr. Kotut seeks to highlight how learning from these underrepresented stories can inform the design of tools to amplify other communities to tell their own stories offline and online, and, more broadly, in providing spaces to query how these techniques offer key opportunities to understand other emerging and growing areas in computer science including ethics, privacy, (cyber)security and fairness and accountability in algorithm design.