Elissa Redmiles is a faculty member and research group leader of the Safety & Society group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. She additionally serves as a consultant and researcher at multiple institutions, including Microsoft Research and Facebook. Dr. Redmiles uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand users’ security, privacy, and online safety-related decision-making processes. Her work has been featured in popular press publications such as Scientific American, Wired, Business Insider, Newsweek, Schneier on Security, and CNET and has been recognized with multiple Distinguished Paper Awards at USENIX Security and research awards including a Facebook Research Award and the John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Research Award. Dr. Redmiles received her B.S. (Cum Laude), M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

Public Lecture

Abstract

At the beginning of the pandemic contact tracing apps proliferated as a potential solution to scaling infection tracking and response. While significant focus was put on developing privacy protocols for these apps, relatively less attention was given to understanding why, and why not, users might adopt them. Yet, for these technological solutions to benefit public health, users must be willing to adopt these apps. In this talk I showcase the value of taking a descriptive ethics approach to setting best practices in this new domain. Descriptive ethics, introduced by the field of moral philosophy, determines best practices by learning directly from the user – observing people’s preferences and inferring best practice from that behavior – instead of exclusively relying on experts’ normative decisions. This talk presents an empirically-validated framework of user’s decision inputs to adopt COVID19 contact tracing apps, including app accuracy, privacy, benefits, and mobile costs. Using predictive models of users’ likelihood to install COVID apps based on quantifications of these factors, I show how high the bar is for achieving adoption. I conclude by discussing a large-scale field study in which we put our survey and experimental results into practice to help the state of Louisiana advertise their COVID app through a series of randomized controlled Google Ads experiments.

Online Event

Join us via Zoom: tuwien.zoom.us/j/97654713549

About The Lecture Series

ViSP is organizing a Distinguished Lecture Series with internationally renowned researchers from the field of Security & Privacy. Every month there will be a talk on a current research topic, followed by an open discussion.

About ViSP

ViSP, the Vienna Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Center, consists of researchers from IST Austria, TU Wien and Uni Wien. With these three institutes, Vienna offers an exceptional degree of excellence for research in the area of Security and Privacy. The mission of ViSP is to unlock the true potential of the location by fostering collaborations between different institutes in Vienna. This collaboration strives to do impactful research and advance state of the art, securing Vienna’s pioneer role in the research in Security and Privacy.

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