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User-Based Testing of Smart Home Technology in a Controlled Environment: Amazon, Apple and Google Systems View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Wright
This research utilizes three separate labs designed to approximate living room environments. Each lab is equipped with smart home technology from one of three manufacturers: Amazon, Apple, or Google. Each also includes similar IoT smart technology including televisions, thermostats, lights, door locks, cameras, and voice assistants/hubs, among others. Participants are provided with a list of tasks to accomplish using a variety of methods including cell phone apps, voice commands, and touchscreen hub interfaces. Users are also asked to created routines that utilize multiple devices in response to a single command. After testing in each room, participants complete a survey and are asked a series of open-ended questions regarding their experiences with the system in that room. Those questions focus on the usability of the various interfaces (voice, app, hub) and user experiences related to ease of use, efficiency, and engagement. Results are used to make suggestions for future smart home interfaces and to pattern user preferences among and between rooms. This research is ongoing and will be completed by the end of May, 2023.
Featured Doxxing as a Site of Harm and Resistance: Findings from Interviews with Victim-survivors View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Briony Anderson
Doxxing, a form of privacy abuse, implicates victims in an enduring cycle of harm through the non-consensual disclosure of their personal, identifying and sensitive information. These disclosures make victims vulnerable to ancillary forms of harm, highlighting serious challenges to our understandings of the boundaries, functions and ownership of personal data. This paper draws upon my doctoral research into doxxing, extrapolating from 18 interviews with victim-survivors about their experiences of doxxing and their avenues for seeking justice. I situate the harm of doxxing at the intersection of power structures like patriarchy, misogyny and family violence, in addition to myriad cybercrimes such as image-based sexual abuse, blackmail and financial fraud. As such, doxxing draws attention to the invitational qualities of technology to ‘call in’ moments of harm technicity, where doxxed information takes on a viral life of its own. While my findings indicate that doxxing harms reflect gendered dynamics offline, I center victim-survivor strategies of reclaiming, resistance and informal justice seeking. Here, the invitational qualities of technology also afford victim-survivors with alternate strategies to perform resistance and reclaim their informational autonomy. Using an invitational theory of technology has implications not only for framing doxxing as a form of technology-facilitated abuse, but also affirms victim-survivors’ agency to sketch out new boundaries of data ownership on their own terms.
Biosafety and Transparency in the Review and Oversight of Research Involving Potentially Dangerous Biotechnology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Patrone
Research involving recombinant DNA technologies, synthetic nucleic acid molecules, or deadly pathogens has important social benefits, but such research also carries risks for researchers, the public health, and the environment. For the past fifty years in the United States, the biosafety regulatory strategy has relied heavily on local review bodies, now called Institutional Biosafety Committees (IBCs), to ensure researchers are exercising adequate biosafety and containment practices. Since its inception, this system has relied on professional self-regulation and the value of transparency and public communication to ensure safe biotech research practices while avoiding legislative oversight that may stifle socially beneficial development. As such, IBCs are required by US federal regulations to make certain information about biosafety review available to the public. We examine internal documents from a large, stratified sample of federally registered IBCs to determine the extent to which review bodies comply with federal requirements to record and make public certain information about their review and oversight of research involving potentially dangerous biotechnologies. Numerous failures to comply with the regulatory requirements regarding transparency and public communication about biotech research and review were observed. The importance of transparency in biosafety, emerging challenges for ensuring safe biotech research in an increasingly privatized oversight system, and some simple strategies for promoting biosafety and greater transparency in biotech research are discussed in light of these findings.
