Designing Usable and Useful Privacy Interfaces
CS Distinguished Seminar Series
October 24, 2024
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Designing Usable and Useful Privacy Interfaces
Presenter: Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: 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. Cranor will present a privacy choice mechanism evaluation framework 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.
Speaker bio: Lorrie Faith Cranor (lorrie.cranor.org) is the director and Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies of CyLab and the FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-directs the Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as chief technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company that was acquired by Proofpoint. She founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) and co-founded the Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR). Cranor has served on a number of boards, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors, the Electronic Privacy Information Center Advisory Board, the Computing Research Association Board of Directors, and the Aspen Institute Cybersecurity Group. She was elected to the ACM CHI Academy and named a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research. Cranor 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 where she worked on fiber arts projects, including a quilted visualization of bad passwords that was featured in Science Magazine as well as a bad passwords dress that she frequently wears when talking about her research. She plays soccer, walks to work, sews her own clothing with pockets, and tries not to embarrass her three young adult children.
Faculty host: Professor Chris Kanich
Date posted
Oct 21, 2024
Date updated
Oct 31, 2024