SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Leveraging community oversight to enhance collective efficacy for privacy and security

This research concerns how groups of people can cooperate to protect their privacy. The researchers will study how people can help one another to manage their digital privacy and security. Offline, people support each other informally to make privacy and security decisions, by sharing stories or exchanging advice, but technology designs for privacy do not reflect these social processes. This project builds on social science research on collective efficacy and citizen participation in problem solving, and develops a model of community oversight to help groups of people collectively manage their digital privacy and security. The researchers will evaluate this model within the context of mobile smartphones, and prototype a mobile app for groups of interconnected users to share and provide feedback regarding a range of mobile privacy and security settings. Research with people will also provide insight into how to support different groups to communicate and collaborate around mobile security and safety. The willingness of individuals to intervene on others' behalf is known as collective efficacy, and the intention of the model of community oversight is to support and improve this outcome among interconnected individuals or existing communities such as families, friends, co-workers in a manner that enhances their digital privacy and security. The work makes a theoretical contribution by offering a model of community oversight and demonstrating how this model might be translated into sociotechnical design. The user studies will provide valuable insights into the social and technical factors that impact user participation in community oversight for digital privacy and security. Through the implementation and deployment of the mobile app in the field, the researchers will evaluate how users interact with the technology artifact and with each other, providing valuable design guidelines for future systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.