Seminar: Real News and Fake Photos: Towards Usable Privacy for Journalism and Photo Sharing

Abstract

Users are often considered the weakest link in computer security and privacy. In this talk, I will discuss two projects where we aim to improve the usability of security and privacy technologies by focusing on the needs, practices, and abilities of users. In the first project, we study the technology ecosystem within journalism, focusing on journalists' use of collaborative technologies. Surprisingly, we find something very rare in computer security: a success story. In the second project, we invent and evaluate new obfuscation methods that help people prevent privacy issues such as inference attacks, re-identification, and leaks of sensitive information while sharing photos online. To conclude, I will discuss some of the unexpected sociotechnical connections between these projects including ethical questions and emerging technologies around fake photos and the future of journalistic collaboration.

Speaker's Biography

Dr. Kelly Caine is Dean's Associate Professor in the Human-Centered Computing Division of the School of Computing at Clemson University. She is the founder and director of the Humans and Technology Lab (www.hatlab.org) where she leads multidisciplinary research in humancentered computing, privacy, usable security, cybersecurity, health informatics, and human-computer interaction. Her work in these areas has been recognized with awards from the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, the National Science Foundation, the American Public Health Association, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She is the co-author of Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research (2015; with Catherine Courage and Kathy Baxter) and has published over one hundred academic manuscripts in venues ranging from ACM CHI to the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. She loves teaching students about science and has mentored over 60 students, ranging from undergraduates to post-doctoral fellows, as research assistants in her lab. Prior to joining Clemson, she was Principal Research Scientist in the School of Computing at Indiana University and a UX researcher at Google. She holds degrees from the University of South Carolina (B.A.) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (M.S. and Ph.D.). For more see www.kellycaine.org.