Four CHI Papers Accepted

Congratulations to the STIR Lab and their collaborators for having four CHI 2022 papers accepted. Below are the paper titles, co-authors, and abstracts of the accepted papers. We hope to see you in New Orleans (or virtually) this year!

• Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth: Analyzing Media Shared within Safe Versus Unsafe Private Conversations on Instagram

Shiza Ali, Afsaneh Razi, Seunghyun Kim, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Joshua Gracie, Munmun De Choudhury, Pamela J. Wisniewski, and Gianluca Stringhini

We collected Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) from 100 adolescents and young adults (ages 13-21) who then flagged their own conversations as safe or unsafe. We performed a mixed-method analysis of the media files shared privately in these conversations to gain human-centered insights into the risky interactions experienced by youth. Unsafe conversations ranged from unwanted sexual solicitations to mental health-related concerns, and images shared in unsafe conversations tended to be of people and convey negative emotions, while those shared in regular conversations more often conveyed positive emotions and contained objects. Further, unsafe conversations were significantly shorter, suggesting that youth disengaged when they felt unsafe. Our work uncovers salient characteristics of safe and unsafe media shared in private conversations and provides the foundation to develop automated systems for online risk detection and mitigation.

• Limiting Apps vs. Permissions: Profiling Smartphone Users to Understand Differing Strategies for Mobile Privacy Management

Ashwaq Alsoubai, Reza Anaraky Yao Li, Xinru Page, Bart Knijnenburg and Pamela J. Wisniewski

We conducted a user study with 380 Android users, profiling them according to two key privacy behaviors: the number of apps installed and the Dangerous permissions granted to those apps. We identified four unique privacy profiles: 1) Privacy Balancers (49.74% of participants), 2) Permission Limiters (28.68%), 3) App Limiters (14.74%), and 4) the Privacy Unconcerned (6.84%). App and Permission Limiters were significantly more concerned about perceived surveillance than Privacy Balancers and the Privacy Unconcerned. App Limiters had the lowest number of apps installed on their devices with the lowest intention of using apps and sharing information with them, compared to Permission Limiters who had the highest number of apps installed and reported higher intention to share information with apps. The four profiles reflect the differing privacy management strategies, perceptions, and intentions of Android users that go beyond the binary decision to share or withhold information via mobile apps.

• Perceiving Affordances Differently: The Unintended Consequences When Young Autistic Adults Engage with Social Media

Xinru Page, Andrew Capener, Spring Cullen, Tao Wang, Monica Garfield, and Pamela J. Wisniewski

Social media can facilitate numerous benefits, ranging from facilitating access to social, instrumental, financial, and other support to professional development and civic participation. However, these benefits may not be generalizable to all users. Therefore, we conducted an ethnographic case study with eight Autistic young adults, ten staff members, and four parents to understand how Autistic users of social media engage with others, as well as any unintended consequences of use. We leveraged an affordances perspective to understand how Autistic young adults share and consume user-generated content, make connections, and engage in networked interactions with others via social media. We found that they often used a literal interpretation of digital affordances that sometimes led to negative consequences, including physical harm, financial loss, social anxiety, feelings of exclusion, and inadvertently damaging their social relationships. We make recommendations for redesigning social media affordances to be more inclusive of neurodiverse users.

• A New Uncanny Valley? The Effects of Speech Fidelity and Human Listener Gender on Social Perceptions of a Virtual-Human Speaker

Tiffany D. Do, Ryan P. McMahan, and Pamela J. Wisniewski

Virtual humans can be used to deliver persuasive arguments; yet, those with synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) have been perceived less favorably than those with recorded human speech. In this paper, we investigate standard concatenative TTS and more advanced neural TTS. We conducted a 3×2 between-subjects experiment (n=79) to evaluate the effect of a virtual human’s speech fidelity at three levels (Standard TTS, Neural TTS, and Human speech) and the listener’s gender (male or female) on perceptions and persuasion. We found that the virtual human was perceived as significantly less trustworthy by both genders, if they used neural TTS compared to human speech, while male listeners (but not females) also perceived standard TTS as less trustworthy than Human speech. Our findings indicate that neural TTS may not be an effective choice for persuasive virtual humans and that gender of the listener plays a role in how virtual humans are perceived.