It Takes a Village: A Case for Including Extended Family Members in the Joint Oversight of Family-based Privacy and Security for Mobile Smartphones
Mamtaj Akter, Leena Alghamdi, Jess Kropczynski, Heather Lipford, Pamela Wisniewski
TL;DR
The paper addresses the need for scalable privacy and security management in mobile devices by extending joint oversight beyond parent–teen dyads to include extended family. It presents CO-oPS, a mobile app designed for community oversight of privacy and security, and reports a lab-based study with 19 parent–teen pairs to explore benefits, risks, and design considerations of involving grandparents, siblings, and cousins. Key findings show perceived benefits in broader knowledge sharing and caregiving for vulnerable members, balanced against risks of tension and autonomy infringement; participants call for fine-grained sharing controls and remote-assistance options. The work advances networked privacy research by demonstrating how extended family networks can collaborate to improve mobile privacy and safety, while highlighting the need for configurable privacy mechanisms to maintain trust and minimize conflict.
Abstract
We conducted a user study with 19 parent-teen dyads to understand the perceived benefits and drawbacks of using a mobile app that allows them to co-manage mobile privacy, safety, and security within their families. While the primary goal of the study was to understand the use case as it pertained to parents and teens, an emerging finding from our study was that participants found value in extending app use to other family members (siblings, cousins, and grandparents). Participants felt that it would help bring the necessary expertise into their immediate family network and help protect the older adults and children of the family from privacy and security risks. However, participants expressed that co-monitoring by extended family members might cause tensions in their families, creating interpersonal conflicts. To alleviate these concerns, participants suggested more control over the privacy features to facilitate sharing their installed apps with only trusted family members.