UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Lorrie Faith Cranor, director and Bosch Distinguished Professor of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, will present a talk, “Designing Useful and Usable Privacy Interfaces,” at 11:45 a.m. Friday, Nov. 12, as part of the College of Information Sciences and Technology Distinguished Lecture Series.
This virtual event is free and open to the Penn State community. Full details and a link to the talk can be found at ist.psu.edu/lorrie-cranor.
About the talk
Users who wish to exercise privacy rights or make privacy choices must often rely on website or application 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 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 the research she’s conducted on this topic at Carnegie Mellon University, including the 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 is the director and Bosch Distinguished Professor of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute and FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also 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 and co-directs the MSIT-Privacy Engineering master’s program. In 2016, she served as chief technologist at the US 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. Her pandemic pet is a bass flute.
About the 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. The 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.