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Understanding Value and Design Choices Made by Android Family App Developers

Published: 25 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The rapidly expanding family mobile app market provides a great opportunity for children's education and development. However, recent research has revealed a prevalence of persuasive designs and tracking of children's data in these apps, which may harm children's online privacy and self-regulation development. We conducted 20 interviews with Android family app developers to understand their design practices. We used the lens of Value Sensitive Design to identify developer's values and how they translate them into design choices. Our findings show that though developer values are generally aligned with the best interest of users, they often must make compromises due to market pressure, lack of monetisation options, and the use of biased design guidelines. Our findings show a need for centralised actionable guidelines and important directions for HCI research to support both end-users' and developers' values.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2020
      4474 pages
      ISBN:9781450368193
      DOI:10.1145/3334480
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Publication History

      Published: 25 April 2020

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      1. child safety online
      2. developer practices
      3. responsible design
      4. value sensitive design

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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      • (2024)Understanding Parents’ Perceptions and Practices Toward Children’s Security and Privacy in Virtual Reality2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00222(1554-1572)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
      • (2024)A Developer-Centric Study Exploring Mobile Application Security Practices and Challenges2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00081(778-790)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
      • (2023)How Can We Design Privacy-Friendly Apps for Children? Using a Research through Design Process to Understand Developers' Needs and ChallengesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100667:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
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      • (2021)Deciding on personalized adsProceedings of the Seventeenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3563572.3563602(573-595)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
      • (2021)“Developers Are Responsible”: What Ad Networks Tell Developers About PrivacyExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451805(1-11)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
      • (2021)Towards Suitable Free-to-Play Games for ChildrenEntertainment Computing – ICEC 202110.1007/978-3-030-89394-1_20(264-276)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2021

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