yuxi 👩🏻‍🏫

@yuxiwu.com

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privacy, design, hiking, photography postdoc @ northeastern khoury

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."
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 clients’ personal documents, monitoring clients’ 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.
a cityscape with the transamerica pyramid in the middle, cut off at the top
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.