Two papers were accepted to TPRC, the 42nd Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy! The conference itself will be held at September 12-14, 2014, at George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, VA, USA.

The conference is a meeting point between technology and policy, and the two papers that were accepted reflect this interdisciplinary nature. The first paper, “Are Designers Ready for Privacy by Design? Examining Perceptions of Privacy Among Information Systems Designers”, is part of our Privacy by Design project, a study at the intersection of law and engineering with Prof. Michael Birnhack and Dr. Irit Hadar. It details the results of a qualitative study based on interviewing software architects and senior designers. The abstract is available here.

In the second paper, “An Algorithmic Approach To Evaluating Default Privacy Options”, with Eran, Rony  and Hadas, we suggest and evaluate an assessment method that analyzes the service’s default options, by comparing them to the actual preferences of a sample of people who already use the service. We empirically evaluate our assessment using data collected from Facebook, describing the detailed privacy behavior of about 400 Facebook users. We analyze the users’ privacy preferences, and validate it using external resources and surveys regarding Facebook usage.