Jane Im

Research Abstract:

Existing social platforms enable two classes of problems that negatively impact society: 1) interpersonal harm people cause one another on the platforms (e.g., online harassment) and 2) institutional exploitation of platform users (e.g., companies’ invasive data tracking of users). Both are closely related to issues of consent (e.g., "Do I decide to interact with this user?", "Do I opt into platforms’ tracking for targeted ads?"), and therefore, consent is an important concept to define for software design. Drawing from feminist literature, which stresses a culture of care and impacts on marginalized groups, I propose a theoretical framework of affirmative consent to reimagine social platforms, and show how to apply it in two specific contexts. Affirmative consent is voluntary, informed, revertible, specific, and unburdensome. These principles can serve as software specifications that lead to concrete new design ideas for consentful systems. Along those lines, I have two ongoing research projects. The first is designing and building software to enable consentful connections among people who want to identify others who share their problems, but require high levels of trust before they are willing to share. In particular, I focus on abuses of power in advising relationships between PhD students and faculty. I am currently working on a software that helps PhD students identify other students who face the same issues of power dynamics in advising relationships, and connect with each other—as a first step towards potential solutions. In the second project, I focus on users’ consent and social media companies’ power, and study how users perceive platforms’ business models. Because companies deceive users in making unenthusiastic privacy decisions—largely because they rely on online behavioral advertising for revenue, it is important to explore a wide range of business models and understand how users make sense of them. Through experimental vignette studies, I study how users perceive various combinations of social platforms’ business models, types of companies, and usage of privacy-enhancing technologies.

Bio:

Jane Im is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint PhD degree at the University of Michigan School of Information and Division of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering. She is advised by Professors Kentaro Toyama and Nikola Banovic. As a Human-Computer Interaction researcher, Jane designs and builds consentful social computing systems. Jane’s dissertation research has given practical help to founders of newly emerging social media, and her internship research impacted Meta's privacy strategy. Her work has been recognized with a Rackham Barbour Scholarship, a Meta Research PhD Fellowship, and an Honorable Mention Award from ACM CHI. Before coming to Michigan, she completed her undergraduate studies in Business Management and Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University.