CITP Distinguished Lecture Series: Designing Usable and Useful Privacy Choice Interfaces

Please register here to attend in person.

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Users who wish to exercise privacy rights or make privacy choices must often rely on website or app user interfaces. However, too often, these user interfaces suffer from usability deficiencies ranging from being difficult to find, hard to understand, or time-consuming to use, to being deceptive and dangerously misleading. This talk will discuss user-centric approaches to designing and evaluating privacy interfaces that better meet user needs and reduce the overwhelming number of privacy choices. A privacy choice mechanism evaluation framework will be presented and several examples of privacy interface design and evaluation from my research, including more usable cookie consent banners, mobile app privacy nutrition labels, IoT privacy and security labels, and a privacy options icon for the State of California.

Bio: Lorrie Faith Cranor is a professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission, working in the office of Chairwoman Ramirez. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company. She has authored over 150 research papers on online privacy, usable security, and other topics.

She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O’Reilly 2005) and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O’Reilly 2002). She has served on a number of boards, including the Foundation Board of Directors, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In her younger days she was honored as one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. More recently she was named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to usable privacy and security research and education, and an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to privacy engineering. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University.

She holds a doctorate in Engineering and Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012-13 she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on fiber arts projects that combined her interests in privacy and security, quilting, computers, and technology. She practices yoga, plays soccer, and runs after her three children.

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Co-sponsored by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

To request accommodations for a disability please contact Jean Butcher, butcher@princeton.edu, at least one week prior to the event.

This seminar will be livestreamed, recorded and posted to the CITP website, CITP YouTube channel and Princeton University’s Media Central channel.

The livestream will be available here: https://mediacentrallive.princeton.edu/