Wir laden herzlich zur CASA Distinguished Lecture am 15. Juli 2025 um 14.00 Uhr ein.
Wann: 15.07.2025, 14:00 Uhr
Wo: MB1 Seminarraum (S-MO-104)
Online-Teilnahme: Zoom-Webinar
Abstract:
The Tor Browser is currently one of main means of browsing the web with strong anonymity. The privacy properties of the Tor Browser and the privacy sensitivity of its user base preclude the collection of traditional telemetry and analytics to understand the problems users face. To address this issue, we developed ReporTor, a plugin to facilitate anonymous, voluntary reporting of problems during naturalistic browsing via the Tor Browser. We confirmed the effectiveness and utility of ReporTor by reporting the problems we encountered during a month of naturalistic web browsing via the Tor Browser. Our approach of evaluating our own tool in a real-world deployment by using it ourselves and documenting our own experiences helped us overcome the difficulties inherent to recruiting current users of the Tor Browser. We found that ReporTor enabled nuanced in-depth analysis of the causes underlying the reported problems. Our findings indicate that integrating ReporTor into the Tor Browser can leverage anonymous user-driven issue reporting at scale to surface the challenges users face in everyday browsing with the Tor Browser. Analyzing and addressing the reports can, in turn, enhance the user experience of the Tor Browser and facilitate its adoption for everyday web browsing. Our deployment additionally helped us identify how ReporTor could be improved. Based on our experience, we call for greater acceptance and adoption of methods that leverage researcher experiences to study user experience challenges, especially when recruiting users poses insurmountable difficulties, such as in the case of topics connected to privacy and security.
Bio:
Sameer Patil is an Associate Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. Previously, he has held several appointments in academia and industry, including Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria), Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (Finland), University of Siegen (Germany), Yahoo Labs (USA), New York University (USA), and Indiana University Bloomington (USA). Sameer's research focuses on human-centered investigations of cybersecurity, covering the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), and social computing. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Google. Sameer obtained a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of California, Irvine and holds Master’s degrees in Information (HCI) and Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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