[ I'm very thankful and excited to share that I will be joining CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, an institution within the Helmholtz Association, as a tenure-track faculty member in October 2025! A big thank you to everyone who has helped me, especially my advisor! 😊 ]

I recently finished my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Computer Science & Engineering. My advisor was the incomparable Kentaro Toyama.

I am a Human-Computer Interaction researcher. I design and build digital systems that center the consent of users—who often hold less power than system creators—to better support users’ nuanced needs around agency, privacy, and safety. Consent is fundamentally about ensuring individuals—especially those who tend to be vulnerable—have full agency to decide whether and how an interaction should occur.

Ultimately, my goal is to give users stronger agency over their online interactions and data—especially as emerging technologies are designed or used in ways that increasingly threaten users' agency. I strongly believe that within ethical realms, any individual, regardless of demographics or socio-economic status, should be able to freely carve out the interpersonal interactions they want on a system, or have a say over how tech companies use their data.

My interest in consent and agency also extends to the complexities of power imbalances, which I find fascinating even when they aren’t directly tied to technology—at least at first glance. For example, I've studied power dyanmics in PhD advising relationships.

Selected Full Papers

"I know even if you don't tell me": Understanding Users' Privacy Preferences Regarding AI-based Inferences of Sensitive Information for Personalization
Sumit Asthana, Jane Im, Zhe Chen, Nikola Banovic
CHI 2024

pdf

Less is Not More: Improving Findability and Actionability of Privacy Controls for Online Behavioral Advertising
Jane Im, Ruiyi Wang, Weikun Lyu, Nick Cook, Hana Habib, Lorrie Cranor, Nikola Banovic, Florian Schaub
CHI 2023

Covered by The Wall Street Journal (The article is behind a paywall, but UMSI also wrote about it here.)
Invited by FTC to present to policymakers at PrivacyCon 2024

pdf - blog post - CHI slides - talk

Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms
Jane Im, Jill Dimond, Melody Berton, Una Lee, Katherine Mustelier, Mark Ackerman, Eric Gilbert
CHI 2021

Best Paper Honorable Mention

I want to give a shoutout to the incredible Una Lee. This work builds on and could not have existed without Una's impactful work on consentful technologies. Una introduced the term "consentful technology"—which inspired many people, including me.

pdf - project website: consentful.systems - CHI slides - talk

See all publications/projects