Existing social computing systems, such as social media and workplace software, enable two broad classes of problem: 1) interpersonal harm users cause one another (e.g., online harassment) and 2) institutional abuse and exploitation of users (e.g., companies’ surveillance of users). Both types of issues are closely related with people’s consent decisions (e.g., user-to-user: "Do I decide to interact with this person on social media?"; user-to-company: "Do I opt in to platforms’ tracking for targeted ads?"). However, despite its relevance to socio-technical problems, the concept of consent has not been fully expored to design safety tools that respect users’ consent boundaries, nor has it been able to result in informed privacy choices (e.g., overwhelming consent popups). In my research, I rethink the definition of consent by drawing from feminist and Human-Computer Interaction literature to reimagine social software that people can use with enthusiastic consent. Based on such understanding of consent-centered software design, I combine systems-building and empirical studies (e.g., experiment, field deployment), to design and build privacy/safety tools and governance mechanisms for enabling safer online interactions.

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information and the Division of Computer Science & Engineering. I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Nikola Banovic and Dr. Florian Schaub. I am also part of the Human-Centered Computing Lab. My work is supported by a Barbour Scholarship and a Meta Research PhD Fellowship.