a great time today with our SIG attendees, who sketched out some lovely, hopeful alternative tech futures ๐ฎ #cscw2025
many thanks to co-organizers beatriz palacios abad, vishฤl sharma, @hanlinliii.bsky.social, and @alexandrato.bsky.social; excited for the future of this community!
please reach out with any tenure-track faculty opportunities in information, media, communication, or interdisciplinary computer science departments ๐ซก
learn more about me here: yuxiwu.com
i'll be hosting a SIG with some familiar faces on wednesday @ 11 in troldtog: "Alternative Technology Consumption Under Capitalism"
if you have interests in resistance, refusal, repair, and post-growth in technology design, we'd love to see you there ๐ฏ
yuxiwu.com/pubs/cscw25_...
i'll be giving a paper talk on monday @ 16:30 in troldtog: "Design(ing) Fictions for Collective Civic Reporting of Privacy Harms"
yuxiwu.com/pubs/cscw25_...
tl;dr: i'm on the academic job market; say hi at #CSCW2025!
i'm a distinguished postdoc fellow at northeastern studying how tech's deep entanglements into society have caused concrete harms to people and changed what privacy fundamentally means (is it dead? is it recoverable? how? ๐จ)
yuxiwu.com
โAIโ isnโt a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. Itโs the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about โresponsibleโ use.
a lovely day to vote for @wutrain.bsky.social, a normal human fellow resident of boston, over a billionaire nepobaby cartoon villain ๐๐
presenting this work at #usesec25 friday morning at 11am!
please come by and say hello to an academic job market candidate (me ๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ซ)
official link to paper: www.usenix.org/system/files...
We developed five storyboards of potential S&P challenges that people experiencing homelessness may come across when interacting with service providers. One storyboard shown depicts the following scenario: "Jordan has been homeless for three months and seeks affordable housing. A service provider uses a shared office computer to fill out a housing application for Jordan and forgets to log out."
in storyboard-scaffolded discussions, we found striking mismatches in how homeless individuals and service providers considered security and privacy in their interactions with each other
see our preprint for more on how our participants envisioned concrete ways for aligning these views โฌ๏ธ
Navigating Security and Privacy Threats in Homeless Service Provision People experiencing homelessness interact with service providers to access essential services. As clients, homeless individuals are expected to reveal sensitive information about themselves to service providers, while personal security and privacy (S&P) preferences fall by the wayside. Simultaneously, providers take on S&P-adjacent responsibilities: helping clients fill out applications, safekeeping clientsโ personal documents, monitoring clientsโ online safety, undergoing workplace S&P training, etc. We created five storyboards to represent S&P challenges that clients can face when they interact with providers. In interviews with homeless individuals and service providers in the Northeastern United States, we use these storyboards to explore the S&P challenges in client-provider relationships within homeless services. We find a set of mismatches in S&P priorities between clients and providers, leading to mistrust between the two parties. We provide design recommendations, envisioned by both parties, for providers to bridge these mismatches.
new paper incoming at USENIX Security 2025 ๐ฌ
"Navigating Security and Privacy Threats in Homeless Service Provision"
really grateful to have worked with @hongshen.bsky.social, Fei Fang, and a team of amazing undergrads and community collaborators on this project
yuxiwu.com/pubs/sec25_h...
a cityscape with the transamerica pyramid in the middle, cut off at the top
in town for conpro and ready to rant about cultivating critical reflection and journaling about privacy harms ๐
If someone new to activism tells you about something like Blackout Friday, my feeling is you respond and say, โCool!โ and take part because it costs you nothing, then follow up with โThanks for telling me about thatโdo you want to join me on [sustained action]?โ
48 hours of remembering what sunlight is again; thanks #usec2025๐!
๐ Our new #USEC2025 paper shows that by automating permission decisions based on prior decisions, we risk NORMALIZING privacy discomfort rather than reducing it.
"Modeling End-User Affective Discomfort With Mobile App Permissions"
Paper: sauvikdas.com/papers/60/se...
๐จ In our new #USEC2025 paper, we introduce a secure, physically-intuitive RFID tag that users actually trust.
On-demand RFID: Improving Privacy, Security, and User Trust in RFID Activation through Physically-Intuitive Design
๐ Paper: sauvikdas.com/papers/62/se...
#Privacy #AcademicSky #Security
Paper abstract for "Design(ing) Fictions for Collective Civic Reporting of Privacy Harms": Individually-experienced privacy harms are often difficult to demonstrate and quantify, which impedes efforts for their redress. Their effects often appear small and are inconsistently documented, and they only become more obvious when aggregated over time and across populations. Taking a design fiction approach, we explore the design requirements and cultural ideals of a government-run system that empowers people to collectively report on and make sense of experiences of privacy harm from online behavioral advertising. Through the use of fictional inquiry, story completion, and comicboarding methods, delivered in an online survey with 50 participants, we found that participants had detailed conceptions of the user experience of such a tool, but wanted assurance that their labor and personal data would not be exploited further by the government if they contributed evidence of harm. We extrapolate these design insights to government-supported complaint-reporting platforms in other domains, finding multiple common design gaps that might disincentivize people to report experiences of harm, be they privacy-related or otherwise.
chapter 5 of my dissertation ๐งฉ co-authored with @willie-agnew.bsky.social, keith edwards, + @sauvik.me is coming to #CSCW2025 ๐ณ๐ด
glad to finally share my work on imagining a future of people collectively reporting on privacy harms
preprint: www.yuxiwu.com/pubs/cscw25_...
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what the hell, sure, hello world
a very rainy #cscw and costa rica = shooting the whole trip raw on @halideapp.bsky.social for the first time
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