On Wednesday, April 18th, Eran will give a seminar lecture at Imperial College London. 4:30pm at Huxley 217, on the South Kensington campus. Here are some more details:

Privacy Decision-Making in Social Networks: Choice Architectures and Data Permanency”

Lately, our attention is drawn to the privacy challenges posed by social networks, and especially to the role of people’s consent and control. Recent events, such as the Cambridge Analytica debacle, make us question the value of user control and informed consent in online social networks. In this lecture, we will try to unpack this issue by discussing several studies that analyze two unique aspects of privacy in social networks: the effect of the network’s choice architecture design on people’s choices and the fact that social network information is permanent and can be accessed indefinitely. The studies take an empirical approach, relying on observations of actual behavior as well as experimental user studies, and comprising of more than 600 participants altogether. We discuss the results by framing choice architectures and digital memory in privacy theories and suggest several new mechanisms that can help users gain effective and long-term control over their privacy.