The sex workers in the Global South represent a significant portion of the world sex industry. However, when compared to the relevant HCI literature on sex work and computing, there exists a noticeable gap in comprehending the experiences and circumstances of the sex workers in this region. This study fills the void by presenting the findings of a three-month-long ethnography with 25 legal sex workers in Daulatdia brothel, Bangladesh, revealing their struggles with stigma, low-tech literacy, and the emerging threats of online security, along with their skills and creativity to bypass those. Drawing on the previous literature on South Asian feminism, postcolonial computing, and critical urban studies, we demonstrate how these findings are deeply rooted in the country's history and culture and propelled by a modernist vision of ''development'' that marginalizes such communities. Our discussion advances HCI's discourse on sexuality, privacy, equity, and generates implications for design and policy changes.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642005
Lying and deception are important parts of social interaction; when applied to storytelling mediums such as video games, such elements can add complexity and intrigue. We developed a game, “AlphaBetaCity”, in which non-playable characters (NPCs) made various false statements, and used this game to investigate perceptions of deceptive behaviour. We used a mix of human-written dialogue incorporating deliberate falsehoods and LLM-written scripts with (human-approved) hallucinated responses. The degree of falsehoods varied between believable but untrue statements to outright fabrications. 29 participants played the game and were interviewed about their experiences. Participants discussed methods for developing trust and gauging NPC truthfulness. Whereas perceived intentional false statements were often attributed towards narrative and gameplay effects, seemingly unintentional false statements generally mismatched participants' mental models and lacked inherent meaning. We discuss how the perception of intentionality, the audience demographic, and the desire for meaning are major considerations when designing video games with falsehoods.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642253
Misinformation poses a threat to democracy and to people’s health. Reliability criteria for news websites can help people identify misinformation. But despite their importance, there has been no empirically substantiated list of criteria for distinguishing reliable from unreliable news websites. We identify reliability criteria, describe how they are applied in practice, and compare them to prior work. Based on our analysis, we distinguish between manipulable and less manipulable criteria and compare politically diverse laypeople as end-users and journalists as expert users. We discuss 11 widely recognized criteria, including the following 6 criteria that are difficult to manipulate: content, political alignment, authors, professional standards, what sources are used, and a website’s reputation. Finally, we describe how technology may be able to support people in applying these criteria in practice to assess the reliability of websites.
Extant literature has proposed an important role for trust in moderating people's willingness to disclose personal information, but there is scant HCI literature that deeply explores the relationship between privacy and trust in apparent privacy paradox circumstances. Attending to this gap, this paper reports a qualitative study examining how people account for continuing to use services that conflict with their stated privacy preferences, and how trust features in these accounts. Our findings undermine the notion that individuals engage in strategic thinking about privacy, raising important questions regarding the explanatory power of the well-known privacy calculus model and its proposed relationship between privacy and trust. Finding evidence of \textit{hopeful} trust in participants' accounts, we argue that trust allows people to morally account for their `paradoxical' information disclosure behavior. We propose that effecting greater alignment between people's privacy attitudes and privacy behavior---or `un-paradoxing privacy'---will require greater regulatory assurances of privacy.
Key management has long remained a difficult unsolved problem in the field of usable security. While password-based key derivation functions (PBKDFs) are widely used to solve this problem in centralized applications, their low entropy and lack of a recovery mechanism make them unsuitable for use in decentralized contexts. The multi-factor key derivation function (MFKDF) is a recently proposed cryptographic primitive that aims to address these deficiencies by incorporating commonly used authentication factors into the key derivation process. In this paper, we implement an MFKDF-based Ethereum wallet and perform a user study with 27 participants to directly compare its usability against traditional cryptocurrency wallet architectures. Our results show that MFKDF-based applications outperform conventional key management approaches on both subjective and objective metrics, with a 37% higher average SUS score (p < 0.0001) and 71% faster task completion times (p < 0.0001) for the MFKDF-based wallet.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642464