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1. It’s Still Complicated: From Privacy-Invasive Parental Control to Teen-Centric Solutions for Digital Resilience

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MSEC.2024.3417804  

   Park, Jinkyung Katie; Akter, Mamtaj; Wisniewski, Pamela; Badillo-Urquiola, Karla (January 2024, IEEE Security & Privacy)

   Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop provided an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families. 

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2. From "Fail Fast" to "Mature Safely:" Expert Perspectives as Secondary Stakeholders on Teen-Centered Social Media Risk Detection

   Ma, R; Alsoubai, A; Park, KJ; Wisniewski, PJ (January 2026, 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26))

   In addressing various risks on social media, the HCI community has advocated for teen-centered risk detection technologies over platform-based, parent-centered features. However, their real-world viability remains underexplored by secondary stakeholders beyond the family unit. Therefore, we present an evaluation of a teen-centered social media risk detection dashboard through online interviews with 33 online safety experts. While experts praised our dashboard’s clear design for teen agency, their feedback revealed five primary tensions in implementing and sustaining such technology: objective vs. context-dependent risk definition, informing risks vs. meaningful intervention, teen empowerment vs. motivation, need for data vs. data privacy, and independence vs. sustainability. These findings motivate us to rethink "teen-centered" and a shift from a "fail fast" to a "mature safely" paradigm for youth safety technology innovation.We offer design implications for addressing these tensions before system deployment with teens and strategies for aligning secondary stakeholders’ interests to deploy and sustain such technologies in the broader ecosystem of youth online safety. 

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3. Beyond Parental Control: Designing Adolescent Online Safety Apps Using Value Sensitive Design

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558419884692  

   Badillo-Urquiola, Karla; Chouhan, Chhaya; Chancellor, Stevie; De Choudhary, Munmun; Wisniewski, Pamela (January 2020, Journal of Adolescent Research)

   Parental control applications are designed to help parents monitor their teens and protect them from online risks. Generally, parents are considered the primary stakeholders for these apps; therefore, the apps often emphasize increased parental control through restriction and monitoring. By taking a developmental perspective and a Value Sensitive Design approach, we explore the possibility of designing more youth-centric online safety features. We asked 39 undergraduate students in the United States to create design charrettes of parental control apps that would better represent teens as stakeholders. As emerging adults, students discussed the value tensions between teens and parents and designed features to reduce and balance these tensions. While they emphasized safety, the students also designed to improve parent-teen communication, teen autonomy and privacy, and parental support. Our research contributes to the adolescent online safety literature by presenting design ideas from emerging adults that depart from the traditional paradigm of parental control. We also make a pedagogical contribution by leveraging design charrettes as a classroom tool for engaging college students in the design of youth-centered apps. We discuss why features that support parent-teen cooperation, teen privacy, and autonomy may be more developmentally appropriate for adolescents than existing parental control app designs. 

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4. From Parental Control to Joint Family Oversight: Can Parents and Teens Manage Mobile Online Safety and Privacy as Equals?

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3512904  

   Akter, Mamtaj; Godfrey, Amy J.; Kropczynski, Jess; Lipford, Heather R.; Wisniewski, Pamela J. (March 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Our research aims to highlight and alleviate the complex tensions around online safety, privacy, and smartphone usage in families so that parents and teens can work together to better manage mobile privacy and security-related risks. We developed a mobile application ("app") for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") and had parents and teens assess whether it would be applicable for use with their families. CO-oPS is an Android app that allows a group of users to co-monitor the apps installed on one another's devices and the privacy permissions granted to those apps. We conducted a study with 19 parent-teen (ages 13-17) pairs to understand how they currently managed mobile safety and app privacy within their family and then had them install, use, and evaluate the CO-oPS app. We found that both parents and teens gave little consideration to online safety and privacy before installing new apps or granting privacy permissions. When using CO-oPS, participants liked how the app increased transparency into one another's devices in a way that facilitated communication, but were less inclined to use features for in-app messaging or to hide apps from one another. Key themes related to power imbalances between parents and teens surfaced that made co-management challenging. Parents were more open to collaborative oversight than teens, who felt that it was not their place to monitor their parents, even though both often believed parents lacked the technological expertise to monitor themselves. Our study sheds light on why collaborative practices for managing online safety and privacy within families may be beneficial but also quite difficult to implement in practice. We provide recommendations for overcoming these challenges based on the insights gained from our study. 

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5. Teens as Co-Researchers: Advocating for Disruptive Change to Engage Youth Meaningfully in Online Safety Research and the Design of Social Media

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3757665  

   Ali, Naima Samreen; Ma, Renkai; Agha, Zainab; Park, Jinkyung Katie; Wisniewski, Pamela J (October 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Academic research is largely an adult endeavor that creates systemic power imbalances when studying teen-centered topics, such as adolescent online safety. To rectify this problem, we engaged seven teens as co-researchers through a year-and-a-half-long Youth Advisory Board (YAB) program to critically assess our research processes, lead online safety solutions, and to reflect on their experiences participating in a YAB. Teens pushed back on standard research practices such as parental consent, sought decision-making power in study documentation, design, and execution, and gave more meaningful feedback on research protocols when more deeply involved in the research. For safety interventions, teens proposed both incremental changes for social media platforms (e.g., advanced privacy settings) and more disruptive changes (e.g., decentralized social media platforms) that enhance individual control, digital resilience, and equity. For the YAB, teens highlighted challenges, such as losing momentum over time, lack of collaborative opportunities, and competing interests, fueling frustrations and rifts in engagement. Our research underscores the value of involving teens as co-partners in shaping online safety research. Finally, we provide design implications for social media safety interventions that strengthen teens' agency and actionable guidelines for developing future long-term programs to ensure meaningful contributions to online safety research. 

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