IST Distinguished Lecture Series – Lorrie Faith Cranor

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Join Lorrie Faith Cranor, director and Bosch Distinguished Professor of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, for an upcoming talk in the College of Information Sciences and Technology Distinguished Lecture Series, "Designing Useful and Usable Privacy Interfaces." This lecture is free and open to the Penn State community.

About the talk

Users who wish to exercise privacy rights or make privacy choices must often rely on website or app user interfaces. However, too often, these user interfaces suffer from usability deficiencies ranging from being difficult to find, hard to understand or time-consuming to use, to being deceptive and dangerously misleading. This problem is often exacerbated when trying to make privacy choices for mobile or IoT (Internet of Things) devices with small or non-existent screens. This talk will provide insights into the reasons why it can be difficult to design privacy interfaces that are usable and useful and suggest user-centric approaches to designing privacy interfaces that better meet user needs and reduce the overwhelming number of privacy choices. Cranor will discuss some of the research along these lines at Carnegie Mellon University including design and evaluation of privacy "nutrition" labels for websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices, as well as personal privacy assistants and other tools.

About the speaker

Cranor also is co-director of the Collaboratory Against Hate: Research and Action Center at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. In addition, she directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-directs the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as chief technologist at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. She co-founded Wombat Security Technologies, a security awareness training company that was acquired by Proofpoint. She is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS; a member of the ACM CHI Academy; and a recipient of the IAPP Privacy Leadership Award.

About the IST Distinguished Lecture Series

The College of Information Sciences and Technology’s Distinguished Lecture Series connects researchers, experts and thought leaders with the college community to share perspectives and insights on a variety of topics. Our goal is to enrich the experience of IST students, faculty and staff by inspiring thought-provoking conversations and exposing them to a diverse array of people, backgrounds and ideas in the information sciences and related domains. All lectures are free and open to the Penn State community unless otherwise noted.