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Digital Wellness

Empowering Users in the Digital Age

Research Interests

Secure and Usable Systems Design

  • requirements engineering
  • human computer interaction (HCI)
  • agile development for secure systems

Home Data Security and Privacy

  • risks and impact on the home and third parties
  • understanding home user security
  • preserving home user privacy

Related Areas

  • Appropriate and Effective Controls 
    • Usability, cost, effectiveness need exploring for household, families, and neighbourhoods
    • security design techniques, architectures, practices for home user as system administrators
  • Data Driven Behavioural Understanding
    • in a home setting (multi-households, across neighbourhoods, many families) - collecting, analysing, acting upon data (ethics)
  • Economics of Home Data Security
    • economic models for delivering services to serve the home security market
  • Organisational Role in Home Data Security
    • employers' responsibility in protecting employee's at home
  • Best Practice in Home Data Security
    • security best pracitces for the home

 

Recent Publications

  • Informing the Design of Privacy-Empowering Tools for the Connected Home

    2020
    |
    Conference paper
    Connected devices in the home represent a potentially grave new privacy threat due to their unfettered access to the most personal spaces in people's lives. Prior work has shown that despite concerns about such devices, people often lack sufficient awareness, understanding, or means of taking effective action. To explore the potential for new tools that support such needs directly we developed Aretha, a privacy assistant technology probe that combines a network disaggregator, personal tutor, and firewall, to empower end-users with both the knowledge and mechanisms to control disclosures from their homes. We deployed Aretha in three households over six weeks, with the aim of understanding how this combination of capabilities might enable users to gain awareness of data disclosures by their devices, form educated privacy preferences, and to block unwanted data flows. The probe, with its novel affordances—and its limitations—prompted users to co-adapt, finding new control mechanisms and suggesting new approaches to address the challenge of regaining privacy in the connected home.
    Technology Probe, Privacy-Empowering Technology, Network Disaggregator

  • Responsibility and Privacy: Caring for a Dependent in a Digital Age

    2020
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    c-report
    |
    Privacy and Power: Acknowledging the Importance of Privacy Research and Design for Vulnerable Populations (CHI '20 Workshop)
    Taking care of technology for a dependant can be a daunting task. Often poorly resourced and lacking the formal training and codes of practise available to professionals, those giving informal digital care need to be understood and empowered by the HCI community. These problems are particularly challenging when people who share access to devices must negotiate issues of privacy and security, or when those giving care must do so remotely. For example, situations where one user is given responsibility for devices in the home can further exacerbate existing power asymmetries. Using insights from our past and current work on technology adoption in smart homes, we illustrate the reality of informal digital care and highlight how this reality increases the complexity of researching privacy and requires a human-centered approach.
    communal use, smart home, multi-user

  • Further Exploring Communal Technology Use in Smart Homes: Social Expectations.

    2020
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    c-report
    |
    CoRR

  • Exploring communal technology use in the home uncovering household group-efficacy

    2019
    |
    Conference paper
    |
    ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
    © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Vacuum cleaners, dish washers, and computers have had a lasting impact on ordinary life, and the last wave of ubiquitous technology, smart home technology, once again alters social order and practices in the home. Increasingly pervasive and internet-connected, domestic technology has become a community concern. Communal use of technology poses complex challenges for research and practice, requiring new approaches. Our investigation (36 interviews) of perceptions and considerations of communal device use illustrates how ordinary life evolves facing known and newly evolving challenges. We report four main themes around living with and sharing technology by relating aspects of technology considerations to different social groups. Using these insights, we illustrate participant considerations of personal characteristics, and discuss self-efficacy as a way to look at technology considerations, social groups, and personal characteristics. We outline in three ways how the concept of group-efficacy can help shape further investigation.

  • Smart-home study weighs the privacy risks involved

    2019
    |
    Report
    Martin Kraemer and William Seymour at the University of Oxford report on an ICO-funded research project investigating how ‘smart’ doesn’t have to mean invasive.
    • More
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