From Parental Control to Joint Family Oversight

Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

We conducted a user study with 19 parent-teen dyads to understand the perceived benefts and drawbacks of using a mobile app that allows them to co-manage mobile privacy, safety, and security within their families. While the primary goal of the study was to understand the use case as it pertained to parents and teens, an emerging fnding from our study was that participants found value in extending app use to other family members (siblings, cousins, and grandparents). Participants felt that it would help bring the necessary expertise into their immediate family network and help protect the older adults and children of the family from privacy and security risks. However, participants expressed that co-monitoring by extended family members might cause tensions in their families, creating interpersonal conficts. To alleviate these concerns, participants suggested more control over the privacy features to facilitate sharing their installed apps with only trusted family members. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy;

Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Traditional parental control applications designed to protect children and teens from online risks do so through parental restrictions and privacy-invasive monitoring. We propose a new approach to adolescent online safety that aims to strike a balance between a teen's privacy and their online safety through active communication and fostering trust between parents and children. We designed and developed an Android "app" called Circle of Trust and conducted a mixed methods user study of 17 parent-child pairs to understand their perceptions about the app. Using a within-subjects experimental design, we found that parents and children significantly preferred our new app design over existing parental control apps in terms of perceived usefulness, ease of use, and behavioral intent to use. By applying a lens of Value Sensitive Design to our interview data, we uncovered that parents and children who valued privacy, trust, freedom, and balance of power preferred our app over traditional apps. However, those who valued transparency and control preferred the status quo. Overall, we found that our app was better suited for teens than for younger children.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2024

Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop will provide an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2024

Smartphone users install numerous mobile apps that require access to different information from their devices. Much of this information is very sensitive, and users often struggle to manage these accesses due to their lack of tech expertise and knowledge regarding mobile privacy. Thus, they often seek help from others to make decisions regarding their mobile privacy and security. We embedded these social processes in a mobile app titled "CO-oPS" ("Community Oversight for Privacy and Security"). COoPS allows trusted community members to review one another's apps installed and permissions granted to those apps. Community members can provide feedback to one another regarding their privacy behaviors. Users are also allowed to hide some of their mobile apps that they do not like others to see, ensuring their personal privacy. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy.

EasyChair Preprints, 2018

Children today grow up within an environment with many digital technologies. Yet, the use of technology also brings with it the need to protect one’s information and devices, and for parents, the need to protect their children as well. Previous research on children has mainly focused on addressing technology use among older teens, who are already primary users of many of the same applications as adults. Yet, little is known about the use of technology by younger children, and parents’ perspectives regarding the privacy and security implications of that use. Through 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with parents of children aged 5-12, this study seeks to provide a clearer understanding of security and privacy related concerns, behaviors, and practices of parents and their children. We aim to expand the knowledge related to technology use in the family, and opportunities to improve how we protect and educate children in security and privacy.

2021

Security and privacy of mobile users could also be a topic of primary importance, given the widespread and growing use of connected smartphones, the great amount of personal data which is able to leak, and thus the shortage of proper controlled environments within the present mobile scenario (for instance, mobile apps and their handling of permissions). During this paper we specialize in a crucial a vicinity of this scenario: usage of mobile by teenagers. We preliminarily report on an ongoing study that for the first time analyzes truth potential risks that children face when using their smartphones. The foremost novelty is to travel beyond the use of questionnaires, which are a typical and handy tool but that introduce bias within the analysis and are limited with regard to the amount of data they're going to collect. Instead we collect data employing a parental control approach: with prior consent of the parents, the smartphones of underage children are controlled and analyzed...

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

Mobile privacy and security can be a collaborative process where individuals seek advice and help from their trusted communities. To support such collective privacy and security management, we developed a mobile app for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") that allows community members to review one another's apps installed and permissions granted to provide feedback. We conducted a four-week-long field study with 22 communities (101 participants) of friends, families, or co-workers who installed the COoPS app on their phones. Measures of transparency, trust, and awareness of one another's mobile privacy and security behaviors, along with individual and community participation in mobile privacy and security co-management, increased from pre-to post-study. Interview findings confirmed that the app features supported collective considerations of apps and permissions. However, participants expressed a range of concerns regarding having community members with different levels of technical expertise and knowledge regarding mobile privacy and security that can impact motivation to participate and perform oversight. Our study demonstrates the potential and challenges of community oversight mechanisms to support communities to co-manage mobile privacy and security. 1 Introduction The majority of U.S. adults own smartphones [50], and nearly half of them have reported downloading various third-party apps [8]. These mobile apps often require access to users' sensitive information, such as contacts, emails, location, photos,

Journal of Adolescent Research, 2019

Parental control applications are designed to help parents monitor their teens and protect them from online risks. Generally, parents are considered the primary stakeholders for these apps; therefore, the apps often emphasize increased parental control through restriction and monitoring. By taking a developmental perspective and a Value Sensitive Design approach, we explore the possibility of designing more youth-centric online safety features. We asked 39 undergraduate students in the United States to create design charrettes of parental control apps that would better represent teens as stakeholders. As emerging adults, students discussed the value tensions between teens and parents and designed features to reduce and balance these tensions. While they emphasized safety, the students also designed to improve parent-teen communication, teen autonomy and privacy, and parental support. Our research contributes to the adolescent online safety literature by presenting design ideas from ...

Psychology, Society & Education, 2023

The complexity of the current digital ecosystem calls for the development of parental control mechanisms to guide minors in their use of technology. This study aims to identify the type of parental control measures used by parents to monitor the use that school-age children (6 to 12 years old) make of smartphones. An ex post facto design was prepared after conducting a survey in which 885 people (68.7% mothers) took part. The results showed that 93.7% of the parents surveyed used some type of parental control system to regulate the use of the smartphone. The most frequently strategies were limiting the time when the device could be used and restricting access through passwords. The analysis revealed that parents with higher education used a greater number of control mechanisms. Similarly, the length of time the children were connected was related to the level and intensity of the parental control strategies used. Parents applied a greater number of parental control strategies with pre-adolescent children, in the last years of primary education. Finally, the challenges and opportunities that the use of smartphones can bring to children are discussed, and also the active role that the family should play in digital training and education.

Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2017

Parental control software has been one approach for promoting adolescent online safety, but there is still some ambiguity in the adoption patterns and perceptions of technical mediation for teens' mobile devices. We have collected empirical data from a paired sample of 215 parents and teens. We found that overall usage of technical mediation for mobile devices is low and that parents' and teens' perceptions about the frequency of use are not significantly different. We discuss the implications of our findings and opportunities of future research.