Jessica Vitak
Biographic Data
| ID | 229698 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Vitak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Vitak |
| SIGNATURE | VITAK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9362-9032 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 464 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 11 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Aoir Ethics in Action
Since its inception, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and Internet-facilitated communication and interactions. The AoIR Ethics Working Committee has been committed to ensuring the AoIR Ethics Guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees; our goal is to support ethical decision-making in internet research by ke…
Under-the-radar engagement
Beyond digital news consumption, users may express themselves in relation to the consumed news—for example, through commenting, sharing, or reacting. They may also limit what is termed here news engagement visibility, the extent to which a user’s involvement with news content can be seen by others. Drawing on privacy calculus theory and literature about engagement, avoidance, and relationship management, this study examines—through 50 in-depth in…
Latent privacy management profiles on algorithmic social media
Personalized marketing driven by AI-powered algorithms on social media has introduced significant privacy challenges, prompting users to adopt various privacy management strategies. This study employs latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify distinct user profiles based on privacy management patterns and explore the protection motivation factors that predict them. Using a cross-national survey in the United States and Singapore (N = 2,078), we i…
Understanding screenshot collection and sharing on messaging platforms
Individuals rely on messaging platforms to form and maintain intimate relationships, trusting shared information will remain within intended digital confines. However, the screenshot feature allows people to capture and store pieces of private conversations as a separate file on their device, rendering them shareable with third parties. While usage of this feature can be benign, this study focuses on its ability to breach privacy expectations wit…
Does ostracism/rejection impact self-disclosures? Examining the appeal of perceived social affordances after social threat
Two studies examine how experiencing a social need threat (ostracism and rejection) impacts subsequent preferences for self-disclosure to various digital audiences. Findings consider how contextual/situational factors like need threats may impact the appeal of two established perceived social affordances of media: personalization and privacy/visibility. Participants took part in a (bogus) social media activity to elicit feelings of inclusion/ostr…
Boundary Regulation Processes and Privacy Concerns With (Non-)Use of Voice-Based Assistants
An exemplar of human-machine communication, voice-based assistants (VBAs) embedded in smartphones and smart speakers simplify everyday tasks while collecting significant data about users and their environment. In recent years, devices using VBAs have continued to add new features and collect more data—in potentially invasive ways. Using Communication Privacy Management theory as a guiding framework, we analyze data from 11 focus groups with 65 US…
Power, Stress, and Uncertainty
There is a rich literature on technology’s role in facilitating employee monitoring in the workplace. The COVID-19 pandemic created many challenges for employers, and many companies turned to new forms of monitoring to ensure remote workers remained productive; however, these technologies raise important privacy concerns as the boundaries between work and home are further blurred. In this paper, we present findings from a study of 645 US workers …
Digital parenting divides
This study investigates digital parenting divides, or how parents' strategies for regulating their children’s online activities differ based on their available resources and digital parenting readiness (i.e., digital parenting self-efficacy, attitudes, and knowledge). We conducted a survey of 530 parents that reflected the composition of the U.S. population to explore how parents’ resources and digital parenting readiness predict their digital me…
I wanna share this, but
The social grooming model (SGM), which theorizes social media users’ social grooming behaviors based on invested costs, is robust, reflecting various and nuanced social grooming styles. However, its core assumptions have not been validated. Using a nationally representative sample of 1,001 Taiwanese social media users, we explored costs and privacy for each social grooming behavior via a survey. Our results supported the hypotheses of the SGM. Us…
From context adaptation to context restoration
Context collapse occurs on social media platforms when different groups are mixed into one audience. To advance the understanding of the extensive and complex coping strategies people use to address context collapse, this study makes a conceptual distinction between passively adapting by sharing context-free, general information (context adaptation) and rebuilding contexts to satisfy the diverse needs of impression management (context restoration…
Surveillance and the future of work
The future of work increasingly focuses on the collection and analysis of worker data to monitor communication, ensure productivity, reduce security threats, and assist in decision-making. The COVID-19 pandemic increased employer reliance on these technologies; however, the blurring of home and work boundaries meant these monitoring tools might also surveil private spaces. To explore workers’ attitudes toward increased monitoring practices, we pr…
When research is the context
Social media provides unique opportunities for researchers to learn about a variety of phenomena-it is often publicly available, highly accessible, and affords more naturalistic observation. However, as research using social media data has increased, so too has public scrutiny, highlighting the need to develop ethical approaches to social media data use. Prior work in this area has explored users' perceptions of researchers' use of social media d…
Online social support for infertility in Azerbaijan
Online social support, with its novel opportunities for coping, is especially important for those experiencing isolation. Daughters-in-law in Azerbaijan are isolated and have inadequate support due to patriarchal and patrilocal norms, amplified when they experience infertility. This study considers an online community where supportive communication and resources are exchanged to mitigate infertility isolation. Using virtual ethnography and themat…
Liking versus commenting on online news
By performing actions such as “liking” a post, commenting on it, or sharing it with others, we are constantly expressing our opinions about ongoing news and public affairs on online media platforms. How do these acts of expression affect our feelings and opinions? We address this question from an “affordance” perspective, focusing on the effects of both the presence of the expression affordance (cue effects) and users’ actual engagement with it (…
Disconnectivity synced with identity cultivation
This article elucidates adolescent digital disconnection through the lens of narrative identity development to answer the research question: “How do adolescent disconnection experiences play into ongoing identity development processes?” The study draws from qualitative interviews with 17 Norwegian adolescents. The findings indicate that adolescents are ambivalent about their relationships with social networking sites, producing ripple effects on …
Which mediated social interactions satisfy the need to belong
This investigation uses the two-process model of needs to explore differences between face-to-face communication and interpersonal media in terms of belongingness need satisfaction. Using experience sampling methods, Study 1 (N = 117) explored change in feelings of loneliness and connection from interpersonal media use within a day. Study 2 (N = 1,747) examined the association between loneliness and life satisfaction as mediated by patterns of in…
Youths as targets
A significant number of adolescents and young adults are targeted by online hate speech. The effect of such hateful utterances can involve severe psychological harm, especially for youths who have to master developmental tasks. Therefore, drawing on criminology’s routine activity theory, this study investigates the factors that help explain why youths become victimized through online hate speech. We conducted a national quota-based quantitative o…
From Watched at Work to Watched at Home
The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities and new tensions related to workplace surveillance. Monitoring workers via digital tools to analyze everything from keystrokes to email and social media to the websites they visit is increasingly common, and the shift to remote work in the early days of the pandemic led many employers to consider new ways to monitor their employees while working from home. In this paper, we consider how the pand…
Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)
Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our pre…
Excavating awareness and power in data science
Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such r…
Measuring Americans' Comfort With Research Uses of Their Social Media Data
Research using online datasets from social media platforms continues to grow in prominence, but recent research suggests that platform users are sometimes uncomfortable with the ways their posts and content are used in research studies. While previous research has suggested that a variety of contextual variables may influence this discomfort, such factors have yet to be isolated and compared. In this article, we present results from a factorial v…
Privacy Boundaries and Information Flow Solipsism in the Personal Fitness Information Ecosystem
Fitness trackers are an increasingly popular tool for tracking health and physical activity. Their benefits hinge on ubiquitous data collection and the algorithmic processing of personal fitness information (PFI). While PFI can reveal novel insights about users’ physical activity, health, and personal habits, it also contains potentially sensitive information that third parties may access in contexts unanticipated by fitness tracker users. This p…
Strengthening Children’s Privacy Literacy through Contextual Integrity
Researchers and policymakers advocate teaching children about digital privacy, but privacy literacy has not been theorized for children. Drawing on interviews with 30 families, including 40 children, we analyze children’s perspectives on password management in three contexts—family life, friendship, and education—and develop a new approach to privacy literacy grounded in Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework. Contextual integrity equates pr…
‘There’s nothing really they can do with this information’
Fitness trackers are an increasingly popular tool for tracking one’s health and physical activity. While research has evaluated how these mobile devices can improve health and well-being, few studies have empirically evaluated users’ privacy concerns that stem from the collection, aggregation, and sharing of personal fitness information (PFI). In this paper, we endeavor to gain a more complete picture of users’ experiences with fitness trackers a…
Americans’ willingness to adopt a Covid-19 tracking app
The COVID-19 global pandemic led governments, health agencies, and technology companies to work on solutions to minimize the spread of the disease. One such solution concerns contact-tracing apps whose utility is tied to widespread adoption. Using survey data collected a few weeks into lockdown measures in the United States, we explore Americans’ willingness to install a COVID-19 tracking app. Specifically, we evaluate how the distributor of such…
Explicating Affordances
This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describes a particular affordance without engaging other scholarship addressing that affordance. Second, sev…
Cultivating Social Resources on Social Network Sites
This study explores the relationship between perceived bridging social capital and specific Facebook-enabled communication behaviors using survey data from a sample of U.S. adults (N=614). We explore the role of a specific set of Facebook behaviors that support relationship maintenance and assess the extent to which demographic variables, time on site, total and "actual" Facebook Friends, and this new measure (Facebook Relationship Maintenance Be…
There’s a network out there you might as well tap’
Research has established a positive relationship between Facebook use and perceptions of social capital, a construct that describes the total resources − both potential and actual − available in one’s social network. However, the process through which social capital conversions occur is unclear. This study presents results from semi-structured interviews with 18 adult Facebook users (ages 25 to 55) about their Facebook use, focusing on how partic…
Norm evolution and violation on Facebook
This study explores how norms on social network sites evolve over time and how violations of these norms impact individuals’ self-presentational and relationship goals. Employing Expectancy Violations Theory (Burgoon, 1978) as a guiding framework, results from a series of focus groups suggest that both the content of the violation and the users’ relationship to the violator impact how individuals react to negative violations. Specifically, acquai…
Performing honor online
In recent years, research on online impression management has received considerable scholarly attention, with an increasing focus on how the affordances of new media shape the impression management process. However, scant attention has been paid to how individuals perform their identity online in places where surveillance is the norm—and punishment for non-compliance to behavioral codes is severe. This qualitative study of Azerbaijan, an honor cu…
Ethics Regulation in Social Computing Research
The parallel rise of pervasive data collection platforms and computational methods for collecting, analyzing, and drawing inferences from large quantities of user data has advanced social computing research, investigating digital traces to understand mediated behaviors of individuals, groups, and societies. At the same time, methods employed to access these data have raised questions about ethical research practices. This article provides insight…
More Than Just Privacy
The global coronavirus pandemic has raised important questions regarding how to balance public health concerns with privacy protections for individual citizens. In this essay, we evaluate contact tracing apps, which have been offered as a technological solution to minimize the spread of COVID-19. We argue that apps such as those built on Google and Apple's 'exposure notification system' should be evaluated in terms of the contextual integrity of …
Which mediated social interactions satisfy the need to belong
This investigation uses the two-process model of needs to explore differences between face-to-face communication and interpersonal media in terms of belongingness need satisfaction. Using experience sampling methods, Study 1 (N = 117) explored change in feelings of loneliness and connection from interpersonal media use within a day. Study 2 (N = 1,747) examined the association between loneliness and life satisfaction as mediated by patterns of in…
Unpacking Social Media’s Role in Resource Provision
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge existing beliefs regarding the exchange of social resources within a network. The present study examines individuals’ perceived access to social, emotional, and instrumental resources by analyzing relational and Facebook-specific characteristics of dyadic relationships. Results suggest that the social and technical affordances of the site—including visibility of content and connectio…
The Platformization of the Classroom
Technology platforms, including learning management systems and monitoring tools, have taken root in schools. While seen as bringing efficiency or innovation into classrooms, they also offer greater capacities for surveillance. Drawing on findings from focus groups with teachers in the US, we explore how teachers’ use of technology platforms produces surveillance. We argue that this positions teachers as surveillant consumers who use monitoring a…
Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Intercultural Negotiations of Dataveillance in Platformed Households
The platformization of households is increasingly possible with the introduction of “intelligent personal assistants” (IPAs) embedded in smart, always-listening speakers and screens, such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo. These devices exemplify Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” by commodifying familial and social spaces and funneling data into corporate networks. However, the motivations driving the development of these platforms—and the data…
Youths as targets
A significant number of adolescents and young adults are targeted by online hate speech. The effect of such hateful utterances can involve severe psychological harm, especially for youths who have to master developmental tasks. Therefore, drawing on criminology’s routine activity theory, this study investigates the factors that help explain why youths become victimized through online hate speech. We conducted a national quota-based quantitative o…
Factors Motivating Customization and Echo Chamber Creation Within Digital News Environments
With the influx of content being shared through social media, mobile apps, and other digital sources-including fake news and misinformation-most news consumers experience some degree of information overload. To combat these feelings of unease associated with the sheer volume of news content, some consumers tailor their news ecosystems and purposefully include or exclude content from specific sources or individuals. This study explores customizati…
Surveillance and the future of work
The future of work increasingly focuses on the collection and analysis of worker data to monitor communication, ensure productivity, reduce security threats, and assist in decision-making. The COVID-19 pandemic increased employer reliance on these technologies; however, the blurring of home and work boundaries meant these monitoring tools might also surveil private spaces. To explore workers’ attitudes toward increased monitoring practices, we pr…
When research is the context
Social media provides unique opportunities for researchers to learn about a variety of phenomena-it is often publicly available, highly accessible, and affords more naturalistic observation. However, as research using social media data has increased, so too has public scrutiny, highlighting the need to develop ethical approaches to social media data use. Prior work in this area has explored users' perceptions of researchers' use of social media d…
Measuring Americans' Comfort With Research Uses of Their Social Media Data
Research using online datasets from social media platforms continues to grow in prominence, but recent research suggests that platform users are sometimes uncomfortable with the ways their posts and content are used in research studies. While previous research has suggested that a variety of contextual variables may influence this discomfort, such factors have yet to be isolated and compared. In this article, we present results from a factorial v…
Understanding screenshot collection and sharing on messaging platforms
Individuals rely on messaging platforms to form and maintain intimate relationships, trusting shared information will remain within intended digital confines. However, the screenshot feature allows people to capture and store pieces of private conversations as a separate file on their device, rendering them shareable with third parties. While usage of this feature can be benign, this study focuses on its ability to breach privacy expectations wit…
Digital parenting divides
This study investigates digital parenting divides, or how parents' strategies for regulating their children’s online activities differ based on their available resources and digital parenting readiness (i.e., digital parenting self-efficacy, attitudes, and knowledge). We conducted a survey of 530 parents that reflected the composition of the U.S. population to explore how parents’ resources and digital parenting readiness predict their digital me…
From context adaptation to context restoration
Context collapse occurs on social media platforms when different groups are mixed into one audience. To advance the understanding of the extensive and complex coping strategies people use to address context collapse, this study makes a conceptual distinction between passively adapting by sharing context-free, general information (context adaptation) and rebuilding contexts to satisfy the diverse needs of impression management (context restoration…
Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)
Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our pre…
Excavating awareness and power in data science
Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such r…
Does ostracism/rejection impact self-disclosures? Examining the appeal of perceived social affordances after social threat
Two studies examine how experiencing a social need threat (ostracism and rejection) impacts subsequent preferences for self-disclosure to various digital audiences. Findings consider how contextual/situational factors like need threats may impact the appeal of two established perceived social affordances of media: personalization and privacy/visibility. Participants took part in a (bogus) social media activity to elicit feelings of inclusion/ostr…
Power, Stress, and Uncertainty
There is a rich literature on technology’s role in facilitating employee monitoring in the workplace. The COVID-19 pandemic created many challenges for employers, and many companies turned to new forms of monitoring to ensure remote workers remained productive; however, these technologies raise important privacy concerns as the boundaries between work and home are further blurred. In this paper, we present findings from a study of 645 US workers …
I wanna share this, but
The social grooming model (SGM), which theorizes social media users’ social grooming behaviors based on invested costs, is robust, reflecting various and nuanced social grooming styles. However, its core assumptions have not been validated. Using a nationally representative sample of 1,001 Taiwanese social media users, we explored costs and privacy for each social grooming behavior via a survey. Our results supported the hypotheses of the SGM. Us…
Online social support for infertility in Azerbaijan
Online social support, with its novel opportunities for coping, is especially important for those experiencing isolation. Daughters-in-law in Azerbaijan are isolated and have inadequate support due to patriarchal and patrilocal norms, amplified when they experience infertility. This study considers an online community where supportive communication and resources are exchanged to mitigate infertility isolation. Using virtual ethnography and themat…
It's Complicated
In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, social network sites such as Facebook allowed users to share their political beliefs, support specific candidates, and interact with others on political issues. But do political activities on Facebook affect political participation among young voters, a group traditionally perceived as apathetic in regard to civic engagement? Or do these activities represent another example of feel-good participation that h…
Norm evolution and violation on Facebook
This study explores how norms on social network sites evolve over time and how violations of these norms impact individuals’ self-presentational and relationship goals. Employing Expectancy Violations Theory (Burgoon, 1978) as a guiding framework, results from a series of focus groups suggest that both the content of the violation and the users’ relationship to the violator impact how individuals react to negative violations. Specifically, acquai…
The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures
A large body of research argues that self-presentation strategies vary based on audience. But what happens when the technical features of Web sites enable—or even require—users to make personal disclosures to multiple audiences at once, as is often the case on social network sites (SNSs)? Do users apply a lowest common denominator approach, only making disclosures that are appropriate for all audience members? Do they employ technological tools t…
There’s a network out there you might as well tap’
Research has established a positive relationship between Facebook use and perceptions of social capital, a construct that describes the total resources − both potential and actual − available in one’s social network. However, the process through which social capital conversions occur is unclear. This study presents results from semi-structured interviews with 18 adult Facebook users (ages 25 to 55) about their Facebook use, focusing on how partic…
Privacy and Disclosure in a Social Networking Community
It's Complicated
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJessica VitakJessica Vitak (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include online privacy attitudes and behaviors, context collapse, and social media's role in affecting relational quality
Assessing structural correlates to social capital in Facebook ego networks
Unpacking Social Media’s Role in Resource Provision
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge existing beliefs regarding the exchange of social resources within a network. The present study examines individuals’ perceived access to social, emotional, and instrumental resources by analyzing relational and Facebook-specific characteristics of dyadic relationships. Results suggest that the social and technical affordances of the site—including visibility of content and connectio…
Cultivating Social Resources on Social Network Sites
This study explores the relationship between perceived bridging social capital and specific Facebook-enabled communication behaviors using survey data from a sample of U.S. adults (N=614). We explore the role of a specific set of Facebook behaviors that support relationship maintenance and assess the extent to which demographic variables, time on site, total and "actual" Facebook Friends, and this new measure (Facebook Relationship Maintenance Be…
Social Network Site Affordances and Their Relationship to Social Capital Processes
From both the literature and the everyday experiences, it seems clear that social media are enabling new patterns of communication, interaction, and affiliation; how, why, and to what ends social media use is related to social capital outcomes is the focus of this chapter. The chapter synthesizes the literature on social network sites (SNSs) and social capital in order to describe these dynamics. When studying social media, it is important to rem…
Korean mothers’ KakaoStory use and its relationship to psychological well-being
This study investigates the relationship between life contexts, SNS use, and psychological well-being, by focusing on Korean mothers’ interactions on a popular social network site (SNS), KakaoStory. Through analysis of survey and interview data, we find (1) a positive relationship between KakaoStory use and mothers’ perceptions of positive relations with others (a construct of psychological well-being), but no relationship with overall life satis…
Performing honor online
In recent years, research on online impression management has received considerable scholarly attention, with an increasing focus on how the affordances of new media shape the impression management process. However, scant attention has been paid to how individuals perform their identity online in places where surveillance is the norm—and punishment for non-compliance to behavioral codes is severe. This qualitative study of Azerbaijan, an honor cu…
Facebook as a Research Tool in the Social and Computer Sciences
Explicating Affordances
This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describes a particular affordance without engaging other scholarship addressing that affordance. Second, sev…
Organizational Media Affordances
The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general and for media, then introduces the concept of organizational media affordances as organizational resou…
Ethics Regulation in Social Computing Research
The parallel rise of pervasive data collection platforms and computational methods for collecting, analyzing, and drawing inferences from large quantities of user data has advanced social computing research, investigating digital traces to understand mediated behaviors of individuals, groups, and societies. At the same time, methods employed to access these data have raised questions about ethical research practices. This article provides insight…
Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Intercultural Negotiations of Dataveillance in Platformed Households
The platformization of households is increasingly possible with the introduction of “intelligent personal assistants” (IPAs) embedded in smart, always-listening speakers and screens, such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo. These devices exemplify Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” by commodifying familial and social spaces and funneling data into corporate networks. However, the motivations driving the development of these platforms—and the data…
The Platformization of the Classroom
Technology platforms, including learning management systems and monitoring tools, have taken root in schools. While seen as bringing efficiency or innovation into classrooms, they also offer greater capacities for surveillance. Drawing on findings from focus groups with teachers in the US, we explore how teachers’ use of technology platforms produces surveillance. We argue that this positions teachers as surveillant consumers who use monitoring a…
Factors Motivating Customization and Echo Chamber Creation Within Digital News Environments
With the influx of content being shared through social media, mobile apps, and other digital sources-including fake news and misinformation-most news consumers experience some degree of information overload. To combat these feelings of unease associated with the sheer volume of news content, some consumers tailor their news ecosystems and purposefully include or exclude content from specific sources or individuals. This study explores customizati…
Privacy Boundaries and Information Flow Solipsism in the Personal Fitness Information Ecosystem
Fitness trackers are an increasingly popular tool for tracking health and physical activity. Their benefits hinge on ubiquitous data collection and the algorithmic processing of personal fitness information (PFI). While PFI can reveal novel insights about users’ physical activity, health, and personal habits, it also contains potentially sensitive information that third parties may access in contexts unanticipated by fitness tracker users. This p…
Strengthening Children’s Privacy Literacy through Contextual Integrity
Researchers and policymakers advocate teaching children about digital privacy, but privacy literacy has not been theorized for children. Drawing on interviews with 30 families, including 40 children, we analyze children’s perspectives on password management in three contexts—family life, friendship, and education—and develop a new approach to privacy literacy grounded in Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework. Contextual integrity equates pr…
‘There’s nothing really they can do with this information’
Fitness trackers are an increasingly popular tool for tracking one’s health and physical activity. While research has evaluated how these mobile devices can improve health and well-being, few studies have empirically evaluated users’ privacy concerns that stem from the collection, aggregation, and sharing of personal fitness information (PFI). In this paper, we endeavor to gain a more complete picture of users’ experiences with fitness trackers a…
Americans’ willingness to adopt a Covid-19 tracking app
The COVID-19 global pandemic led governments, health agencies, and technology companies to work on solutions to minimize the spread of the disease. One such solution concerns contact-tracing apps whose utility is tied to widespread adoption. Using survey data collected a few weeks into lockdown measures in the United States, we explore Americans’ willingness to install a COVID-19 tracking app. Specifically, we evaluate how the distributor of such…
More Than Just Privacy
The global coronavirus pandemic has raised important questions regarding how to balance public health concerns with privacy protections for individual citizens. In this essay, we evaluate contact tracing apps, which have been offered as a technological solution to minimize the spread of COVID-19. We argue that apps such as those built on Google and Apple's 'exposure notification system' should be evaluated in terms of the contextual integrity of …
From Watched at Work to Watched at Home
The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities and new tensions related to workplace surveillance. Monitoring workers via digital tools to analyze everything from keystrokes to email and social media to the websites they visit is increasingly common, and the shift to remote work in the early days of the pandemic led many employers to consider new ways to monitor their employees while working from home. In this paper, we consider how the pand…
Computer Science (33 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Political science (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Internet privacy (20 works) · Social Media and Politics (19 works) · Social media (18 works) · Business (17 works) · Impact of Technology on Adolescents (16 works) · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection (16 works)