Preliminary Conference Agenda

Privacy is a complicated and extensively discussed topic in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice. Helen Nissenbaum’s con-textual integrity (CI) theory, which examines privacy by the integrity of en-trenched information collection and flows in a particular context, has been a popular theoretical lens to consider privacy in HCI. Many HCI scholars have also advocated for and applied the CI theory to investigate privacy is-sues in various contexts. However, this article critiques using the CI theory when its original positions and limitations about context, norms, and phys-ical privacy are somewhat dismissed in HCI research. Finally, this article proposes that privacy contains specific universal and fundamental values that are not necessarily context-dependent.

What makes a technology privacy-enhancing? In this study, we construct an explanation grounded in the technologies and practices that people report using to enhance their privacy. We conducted an online survey of privacy experts (i.e., privacy researchers and professionals who attend to privacy conferences and communication channels) and laypersons that catalogs the technologies they identify as privacy enhancing and the various privacy strategies they employ. The analysis of 123 survey responses compares not only self-reported tool use but also differences in how privacy experts and laypersons explain their privacy practices and tools use. Differences between the two samples show that privacy experts and laypersons have different styles of reasoning when considering PETs: Experts think of PETs as technologies whose primary function is enhancing privacy, whereas laypersons conceptualize privacy enhancement as a supplemental function incorporated into other technologies. The paper concludes with a discussion about potential explanations for these differences, as well as questions they raise about how technologies can best facilitate communication and collaboration while enhancing privacy.

Cross-session search (XSS) describes situations in which users search for information related to the same task across multiple sessions. While there has been research on XSS, little attention has been paid to users’ motivations for searching multiple sessions in real-life contexts. We conducted a diary study to investigate the reasons that lead people to search across multiple sessions for their own tasks. We applied Lin and Belkin’s [24] MISE theoretical model as a coding framework to analyze users’ open-ended responses about their XSS reasons. We open-coded reasons that the MISE model did not cover. Our findings identified a subset of session resuming reasons in the MISE model (i.e., spawning, transmuting, unanswered-incomplete, cultivated-updated, and anticipated) as the main reasons that caused people to start a search session in our participants’ real-world searches. We also found six additional session resuming reasons rarely discussed in the context of XSS: exploring more topic aspects, finding inspiration and examples, reviewing the information found earlier, monitoring task progress, completing a search following a scheduled plan, and feeling in the mood/having the energy to search. Our results contextualize and enrich the MISE session resuming reasons by examining them in real-world examples. Our results also illustrate that users’ XSS motivations are multifaceted. These findings have implications for developing assisting tools to support XSS and help design different types of search sessions to study XSS behavior.