Learning from the People to Communicate About PETS

Presentation overview

S&P technologies seek to offer a responsible route for data collection that protects the interests of data subjects while also enabling data-hungry innovations. But, effectively communicating the protective guarantees offered by S&P technologies to end users is difficult, raising questions about whether their deployment meaningfully increases willingness to use products or share data. This talk will detail 4 lessons for how to responsibly & effectively communicate about data protection. Drawing on the framework of descriptive ethics, introduced by the field of moral philosophy as an approach to learning best practices from direct observation of people’s preferences and behavior, we will discuss efforts to ethically encourage use of (controversial) new: systems for data collection like COVID19 exposure notification apps, techniques for data protection like differential privacy, and approaches to transparency like verifiable audits of data protections.

Biography

Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles is the Clare Luce Boothe Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Computer Science Department and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand users’ security, privacy, and online safety-related decision-making processes. Her work specifically investigates inequalities in these processes in order to design systems that facilitate safety equitably across users.

Dr. Redmiles has earned multiple paper awards and recognitions at leading conferences such as USENIX Security, ACM CCS, and ACM CSCW. Her research has been presented at the U.S. White House and EU-US Trade and Technology Council, among other international venues, and featured in popular press publications such as the New York Times, Scientific American, and Forbes. She is the recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award and was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2025.

Previously, she was a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and has industry experience at organizations including Microsoft Research, Facebook, and the Partnership on AI. Dr. Redmiles received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.