Alisa Frik

Mohammmad Tahaei, Daricia Wilkinson, Alisa Frik et al.

Calls for engagement with the public in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, development, and governance are increasing, leading to the use of surveys to capture people's values, perceptions, and experiences related to AI. In this paper, we critically examine the state of human participant surveys associated with these topics. Through both a reflexive analysis of a survey pilot spanning six countries and a systematic literature review of 44 papers featuring public surveys related to AI, we explore prominent perspectives and methodological nuances associated with surveys to date. We find that public surveys on AI topics are vulnerable to specific Western knowledge, values, and assumptions in their design, including in their positioning of ethical concepts and societal values, lack sufficient critical discourse surrounding deployment strategies, and demonstrate inconsistent forms of transparency in their reporting. Based on our findings, we distill provocations and heuristic questions for our community, to recognize the limitations of surveys for meeting the goals of engagement, and to cultivate shared principles to design, deploy, and interpret surveys cautiously and responsibly.

Nikita Samarin, Alisa Frik, Sean Brooks et al.

Compared to organizations in other sectors, civil society organizations (CSOs) are particularly vulnerable to security and privacy threats, as they lack adequate resources and expertise to defend themselves. At the same time, their security needs and practices have not gained much attention among researchers, and existing solutions designed for the average users do not consider the contexts in which CSO employees operate. As part of our preliminary work, we conducted an anonymous online survey with 102 CSO employees to collect information about their perceived risks of different security and privacy threats, and their self-reported mitigation strategies. The design of our preliminary survey accounted for the unique requirements of our target population by establishing trust with respondents, using anonymity-preserving incentive strategies, and distributing the survey with the help of a trusted intermediary. However, by carefully examining our methods and the feedback received from respondents, we uncovered several issues with our methodology, including the length of the survey, the framing of the questions, and the design of the recruitment email. We hope that the discussion presented in this paper will inform and assist researchers and practitioners working on understanding and improving the security and privacy of CSOs.