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1. Virtual Classrooms and Real Harms: Remote Learning at U.S. Universities

   Cohney Shaanan, Ross Teixeira (January 2020, Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security)

   null (Ed.)

   Universities have been forced to rely on remote educational technology to facilitate the rapid shift to online learning. In doing so, they acquire new risks of security vulnerabilities and privacy violations. To help universities navigate this landscape, we develop a model that describes the actors, incentives, and risks, informed by surveying 105 educators and 10 administrators. Next, we develop a methodology for administrators to assess security and privacy risks of these products. We then conduct a privacy and security analysis of 23 popular platforms using a combination of sociological analyses of privacy policies and 129 state laws, alongside a technical assessment of platform software. Based on our findings, we develop recommendations for universities to mitigate the risks to their stakeholders. 

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2. The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Fediverse

   https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31316  

   Colglazier, Carl; TeBlunthuis, Nathan; Shaw, Aaron (May 2024, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)

   Online communities often overlap and coexist, despite incongruent norms and approaches to content moderation. When communities diverge, decentralized and federated communities may pursue group-level sanctions, including defederation (disconnection) to block communication between members of specific communities. We investigate the effects of defederation in the context of the Fediverse, a set of decentralized, interconnected social networks with independent governance. Mastodon and Pleroma, the most popular software powering the Fediverse, allow administrators on one server to defederate from another. We use a difference-in-differences approach and matched controls to estimate the effects of defederation events on participation and message toxicity among affected members of the blocked and blocking servers. We find that defederation causes a drop in activity for accounts on the blocked servers, but not on the blocking servers. Also, we find no evidence of an effect of defederation on message toxicity. 

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3. Tensions between Access and Control in Makerspaces

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3432914  

   Logas, Jacob; Zhong, Ruican; Almeida, Stephanie; Das, Sauvik (January 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   Makerspaces have complex access control requirements and are increasingly protected through digital access control mechanisms (e.g., keycards, transponders). However, it remains unclear how space administrators craft access control policies, how existing technical infrastructures support and fall short of access needs, and how these access control policies impact end-users in a makerspace. We bridge this gap through a mixed-methods, multi-stakeholder study. Specifically, we conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with makerspace administrators across the U.S. along with a survey of 48 makerspace end-users. We found four factors influenced administrators' construction of access control policies: balancing safety versus access; logistics; prior experience; and, the politics of funding. Moreover, administrators often made situational exceptions to their policies: e.g., during demand spikes, to maintain a good relationship with their staff, and if they trusted the user(s) requesting an exception. Conversely, users expressed frustration with the static nature of access control policies, wishing for negotiability and for social nuance to be factored into access decisions. The upshot is that existing mechanisms for access control in makerspaces are often inappropriately static and socially unaware. 

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4. The Privacy Policy Landscape After the GDPR

   https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2020-0004  

   Linden, Thomas; Khandelwal, Rishabh; Harkous, Hamza; Fawaz, Kassem (January 2020, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)

   Abstract The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most demanding and comprehensive privacy regulations of all time. A year after it went into effect, we study its impact on the landscape of privacy policies online. We conduct the first longitudinal, in-depth, and at-scale assessment of privacy policies before and after the GDPR. We gauge the complete consumption cycle of these policies, from the first user impressions until the compliance assessment. We create a diverse corpus of two sets of 6,278 unique English-language privacy policies from inside and outside the EU, covering their pre-GDPR and the post-GDPR versions. The results of our tests and analyses suggest that the GDPR has been a catalyst for a major overhaul of the privacy policies inside and outside the EU. This overhaul of the policies, manifesting in extensive textual changes, especially for the EU-based websites, comes at mixed benefits to the users. While the privacy policies have become considerably longer, our user study with 470 participants on Amazon MTurk indicates a significant improvement in the visual representation of privacy policies from the users’ perspective for the EU websites. We further develop a new workflow for the automated assessment of requirements in privacy policies. Using this workflow, we show that privacy policies cover more data practices and are more consistent with seven compliance requirements post the GDPR. We also assess how transparent the organizations are with their privacy practices by performing specificity analysis. In this analysis, we find evidence for positive changes triggered by the GDPR, with the specificity level improving on average. Still, we find the landscape of privacy policies to be in a transitional phase; many policies still do not meet several key GDPR requirements or their improved coverage comes with reduced specificity. 

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5. The Centralization of a Decentralized Video Platform - A First Characterization Of PeerTube

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3717512.3717516  

   Polinski, Michael; Jo, Richard; McAfee, Kevin; Bustamante, Fabián E (October 2024, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review)

   PeerTube is an open-source video sharing platform built as a decentralized alternative to YouTube. With software like Mastodon and Friendica, PeerTube is part of a series of federated social media platforms built partly in response to growing concerns about centralized control and ownership of the incumbent ones. In this paper, we present the first characterization of PeerTube, including its underlying infrastructure and the content being shared on its network. Our findings reveal concerning trends toward centralization that echo patterns observed in other contexts, exacerbated by the limited degree of content replication. PeerTube instances are mostly located in North America and Western Europe, with about 70% hosted in Germany, the USA, and France, and over 50% hosted on the top 7 ***ASes. We also find that over 92% of videos are stored without any redundancy in spite of PeerTube's native support for video redundancy. 

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