Understanding privacy and trust dichotomy

This is an EPSRC Sandpit project in collaboration with University of Kent, Royal Holloway University of London and Edinburgh Napier University to explore the dichotomy between trust and privacy and perceive the variation of these notions across cultures in the cyber space.

Users of social networks often end up sharing significant amount of personal information (like phone numbers) to gain trust. On fora like online dating where trust has to be earned, the price paid is often by giving up privacy. The project will run series of online design workshops to explore the understandings of privacy trade off people consciously or subconsciously do to gain trust across cultures.

We identify this dichotomy between trust and privacy and perceive the variation of these notions across cultures in the cyber space.

Our overall goal is two-fold:

1. evaluate the cultural differences in information sharing practices (privacy-trust dichotomy) used to form trusted digital relationships, and
2. evaluate how visualisations of trust differ across cultures. We will design, organise and conduct two workshops to collect data for our analysis.

The goal of these workshops will be to quantify trust and privacy notions based on certain metrics.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Dr Arthi Manohar - Arthi is a Senior Lecturer and Director for the BSC Product Design in Brunel Design School. She is a design researcher, investigating the relationship between social design and technology. Arthi joined Brunel University in 2018 as a Lecturer in Design. Previous to Brunel, she was a Research Fellow at Northumbria University Newcastle where she explored complex socio-digital problems including designing for trust within TAPESTRY project, funded by the RCUK Digital Economy. She has experience in working across interdisciplinary research groups including Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and the Innovation School at the Glasgow School of Art. Arthi’s Doctorate was a part of an EPSRC Digital Economy project ‘Tales of Things and Electronic Memories’ (TOTeM) from University of Dundee’s Socio Digital group. Her research interests include participatory design, co-design, user-centered design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her research and teaching explore the role of human values by investigating the relationship between the social design and technology. Arthi is a reviewer for HCI, CSCW, IEEE, interdisciplinary journals and conference series. She has been part of various conference program chairs including British HCI 2021, Designing Interaction Systems (DIS) 2019  and IndiaHCI 2019. She is also the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Champion for the Department of Design since 2020. 

Related Research Group(s)

Inclusive Design - Inclusive Design Research Group at Brunel University London brings together multidisciplinary expertise to understand different factors causing exclusion, to develop methods and interventions for improvement, and to advance the knowledge of design for inclusion.

Project last modified 15/07/2021