UCLIC Research Seminar Series

Title
Location
Join this seminar here on Zoom
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss research I conducted as part of my PhD. The topic centres on people's (in)ability to remain silent online. Within the context of HIV status disclosure in online dating or "hook-up" apps used by gay and bisexual men, I will discuss my research exploring the efficacy of "prefer not to say" options often included in disclosure field designs. Through my research, I highlight how these non-disclosure options may not be effective at preserving privacy and providing people with disclosure control. I also highlights how people appropriate these disclosure fields to enhance their privacy by cultivating new meaning into their design and briefly discuss how select findings may generalise to other technologies.
Key papers
Warner, M., Kitkowska, A., Gibbs, J., Maestre, J. F., & Blandford, A. (2020, April). Evaluating 'Prefer not to say' Around Sensitive Disclosures. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3313831.3376150
Warner, M., Maestre, J. F., Gibbs, J., Chung, C. F., & Blandford, A. (2019, May). Signal Appropriation of Explicit HIV Status Disclosure Fields in Sex-Social Apps used by Gay and Bisexual Men. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3290605.3300922
Warner, M., Gutmann, A., Sasse, M. A., & Blandford, A. (2018). Privacy Unraveling Around Explicit HIV Status Disclosure Fields in the Online Geosocial Hookup App Grindr. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 1-22. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3274450
Biography
Mark Warner is a lecturer in the Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) Department at Northumbria University, where he is part of the social computing (NorSC) and NorthLAB research groups. In 2019 he completed his PhD at UCL's Interaction Centre (UCLIC), prior to which he spent over 10 years working as a Digital Forensics Engineer in various Law Enforcement roles. He is a computer scientist with an interest in psychology and sociology. He draws from these disciplines in his research which is centred around supportive computer and AI-mediated communications and interactions. He is particular interested in how technology impacts on the privacy of vulnerable populations, as well as how technology can be used as a tool to mediate these privacy and disclosure behaviours both offline and online.