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Hand-to-Face transmission has been estimated to be a minority, yet non-negligible, vector of COVID-19 transmission and a major vector for multiple other pathogens. At the same time, as it cannot be effectively addressed with mainstream protection measures, such as wearing masks or tracing contacts, it remains largely untackled. To help address this issue, we have developed Saving Face - an app that alerts users when they are about to touch their faces, by analyzing the distortion patterns in the ultrasound signal emitted by their earphones. The system only relies on pre-existing hardware (a smartphone with generic earphones), which allows it to be rapidly scalable to billions of smartphone users worldwide. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of the system, as well as the results of a user study testing the solution's accuracy, robustness, and user experience during various day-to-day activities (93.7% Sensitivity and 91.5% Precision, N=10). While this paper focuses on the system's application to detecting hand-to-face gestures, the technique can also be applicable to other types of gestures and gesture-based applications.
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Deniable Encrypted Messaging: User Understanding after Hands-on Social Experience
Plausible deniability in cryptography allows users to deny their participation in a particular communication or the contents of their messages, thereby ensuring privacy. Popular end-to-end encrypted messaging apps employ the Signal protocol, which incorporates message deniability. However, their current user interfaces only allow access to the blunt tool of message deletion. Denying a message requires users to claim that the counterpart in their conversation has the technical sophistication to forge a message when no usable message forgery tools are available. We evaluate a step towards bridging this gap in the form of a new transcript-editing feature implemented within the Signal app which allows each user to maintain an independent, locally-editable transcript of their conversation. We gave users hands-on experience with this app in the context of resolving a social dispute, and measured their ability to understand its implications both technically and ethically. Users find our interface intuitive and can reason about deniability, but are divided by which circumstances for which deniability is appropriate or desirable. We recommend users be given transparent access to choose when their conversations are deniable versus non-repudiable, instead of the status quo of somewhere-in-between. Our study introduces a novel approach by providing hands-on experience and evaluating its usability. This method offers insights into practical deniability implementation and lays the groundwork for future research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2348181
- PAR ID:
- 10587141
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400717963
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 155 to 171
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Deniability, Message Forgery, Usability, User Experience, Privacy, Signal App
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Karlstad Sweden
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3688459.3688479
