Brett Frischmann

Qian Ma, Yingfan Zhou, Shubhang Kaushik et al.

Users often make security- and privacy-relevant decisions without a clear understanding of the rules that govern safe behavior. We introduce pedagogical friction, a design approach that inserts brief, instructional interactions at the moment of action. We evaluate this approach in the context of password creation, a familiar task with clear quality criteria. We conducted a randomized study with 128 participants across four interface conditions that varied the depth and interactivity of guidance. We assessed three outcomes: (1) rule compliance in a subsequent password task without guidance, (2) accuracy on survey questions tied to password rules, and (3) behavior-knowledge alignment, which captures whether participants who correctly followed a rule also recognized it on the survey. Across the guided conditions, participants corrected most rule violations in the follow-up task and showed high behavior-knowledge alignment. Survey results suggested clearer advantages for some rule types, especially symbol related questions. These results position pedagogical friction as a lightweight intervention for security- and privacy-critical interfaces.

Xinyu Wang, Sai Koneru, Pranav Narayanan Venkit et al.

As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to developing language models that can detect various types of online abuse, e.g., hate speech, cyberbullying. However, there exists a notable disconnect between platform policies, which often consider the author's intention as a criterion for content moderation, and the current capabilities of detection models, which typically lack efforts to capture intent. This paper examines the role of intent in content moderation systems. We review state of the art detection models and benchmark training datasets for online abuse to assess their awareness and ability to capture intent. We propose strategic changes to the design and development of automated detection and moderation systems to improve alignment with ethical and policy conceptualizations of abuse.

Qian Ma, Aditya Majumdar, Sarah Rajtmajer et al.

Privacy policies govern how personal data is collected, used, and shared. Yet, in most privacy-policy consent flows, agreement is operationalized as a single click at the end of a long, opaque policy document. Recent privacy-law scholarship has argued for a standard of demonstrably informed consent. That is, the party drafting and designing privacy-policy consent mechanisms must generate reliable evidence that a person demonstrates comprehension of the consequential terms to which they agree. To this end, we study pedagogical friction as a design framing: minimal interventions embedded within a privacy-policy consent flow that aim to support demonstrated comprehension while keeping burden on the user low. In a randomized experiment, we tested pedagogical friction for demonstrably informed consent in the context of a privacy policy for an edtech app for young children. We recruited 293 parents of kids ages 3-8 to review the app's privacy policy under one of six conditions that varied presentation format and pacing, then complete a six-question comprehension quiz. Three conditions offered a second policy review and quiz retake for participants who did not pass this quiz on their first attempt. We find that the slide-based condition (G3) achieved the highest first-attempt threshold attainment (>=80%) (41.7%), followed by the paced, sectioned condition (G4) (30.6%). In the retake conditions, 64.9% of participants who completed a second attempt improved their score. Notably, in conditions that did not gate consent on demonstrated comprehension, 97.3% of participants who scored below the threshold still chose to consent, suggesting that ungated consent flows can record agreement without demonstrated comprehension. Our results suggest that pedagogical friction can strengthen the evidentiary basis of consent and clarify what it costs in time and burden.