LERSSE paper titled “Towards Understanding Privacy and Trust in Online Reporting of Sexual Assault” has been accepted for 
publication at the Sixteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2020. The paper will be presented at the conference holding later in the year.
LERSSE Paper Gets Accepted at SOUPS 2020
LERSSE Paper Gets Accepted at CHI 2020
LERSSE paper “The Burden of Ending Online Account Sharing” has been accepted at CHI 2020.
The abstract of the paper reads: Many people share online accounts, even in situations where high privacy and security are expected. Naturally, the sharing of these accounts does not endure forever. This paper reports the privacy and security challenges that people experience when they stop online account sharing. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 participants who stopped sharing at least one online account in the 12 months preceding the study. Our results suggest that users experience cognitive and psychosocial burdens when ending account sharing. We offer suggestions for how to improve the design of online accounts to support users better when they end account sharing. Read the full paper here.
LERSSE Paper Receives a Honourable Mention at CHI 2020
LERSSE paper “Amazon vs. My Brother: How Users of Shared Smart Speakers Perceive and Cope with Privacy Risks” (top 5% of submissions) has received an Honourable Mention award at CHI 2020.
With the rapid adoption of smart speakers in people’s homes, there is a corresponding increase in users’ privacy and security concerns. In contrast to previous studies of users’ concerns about smart speakers’ divulging private information to their manufacturers, our study focused on investigating users’ concerns with regard to housemates and external entities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 participants living in 21 households. Our results suggest that users often have an inadequate understanding of what data their smart speakers makes available to all users and what is kept private. Although participants expressed different privacy concerns about their housemates and external entities, they adopted similar, yet suboptimal, risk management strategies. We provide recommendations for future speaker design to support more optimal coping with the perceived risks. For more details, please check the paper.
LERSSE Goes Snowshoeing on Cypress Mountain
At LERSSE, we enjoy being active just as much as we do enjoy research. As a way to experience the snow and the mountains in 2020, LERSSE members and their significant others made the trip to Cypress Mountain for a snowshoeing trip.
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How Cryptocurrency Users Survive the Cryptojungle
Cryptocurrency markets have grown substantially in recent years, and have attracted new users and investors, pushing the overall number of owners into the millions. At the same time, the number of distinct cryptocurrencies has exploded to over 5,000. In this burgeoning and chaotic “cryptojungle,” new and unexplored incentives and risks drive the behavior of users and non-users of cryptocurrencies. While previous research has focused almost exclusively on Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies and utility tokens have been ignored. Led by LERSSE PhD student Artemij Voskobojnikov, an interview study of cryptocurrency users and non-users focused on their perceptions and management of cryptocurrency risks as well as their reasons for or against involvement with cryptocurrencies.
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