DISA SEMINAR

Information Privacy Research at a Crossroad: Challenges and Opportunities

Speaker
Dr. Heng Xu, Professor of Information Technology and Analytics, Kogod School of Business, American University

19 Nov 2021 Friday, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM

Via Zoom

Abstract:
There is a growing concern that what privacy scholars study in research -- theoretically, empirically, and technically -- do not resonate well with consumers or businesses in practice. The subject of information privacy has been labeled by one New York Times article as "too big to understand" for which there is "no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience." The aim of my talk is to review the obstacles facing information privacy researchers today and to offer alternative paths for proceeding forward. I will focus most of the talk on the important role of context in privacy theory and research. Over the past two decades, behavioral research in privacy has made considerable progress transitioning from acontextual studies to using contextualization as a sensitizing device for illuminating the boundary conditions of privacy theories. I will argue, however, that significant challenges await on elevating and converging individually contextualized studies to a context-contingent theory that explicates the mechanisms through which contexts influence consumers' privacy concerns and their behavioral reactions. To address these challenges and to accelerate the transition from contextualizing individual studies to understanding the effects of contexts, I will introduce a new conceptual framework and its associated methodological instantiation for assessing how context-oriented nuances influence privacy concerns. At the end of my talk, I will discuss other barriers facing theoretical, empirical, and technical research in information privacy. Specifically, by drawing an analogy to the development of Artificial Intelligence over the past 70 years, I contend that many of these barriers may trace their root to a set of misplaced ontological and epistemological priorities that were taken for granted in the field. To explore alternative paths, I will conclude by discussing research strategies that could lower the barriers by generating scholarly knowledge from the same continuum as what people draw from when engaging in everyday activities related to their information privacy.

Bio:
Dr. Heng Xu is a Professor of Information Technology and Analytics in the Kogod School of Business at the American University, where she also serves as the Director of the Kogod Cyber Governance Center. Before joining Kogod in 2018, she served as a faculty member at the Pennsylvania State University for 12 years, as well as a program director at the National Science Foundation for 3 years. She has also served on a broad spectrum of national leadership committees including co-chairing the Federal Privacy R&D Inter-agency Working Group in 2016, and serving on the National Academies Committee on Open Science in 2017-2018.

Dr. Xu received her Ph.D. in Information Systems from National University of Singapore in 2006 and her recent research focuses on cybersecurity, privacy protection, data ethics, and algorithmic fairness. Her scholarly work has been published in premier outlets across various fields such as Psychology, Business, and Law, including Psychological Methods, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and others. Her interdisciplinary research and education have been sponsored by many competitive grants from multiple funding agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and National Security Agency. Her work has received many awards, including the Woman of Achievement Award in IEEE Big Data Security (2021), IEEE ITSS Leadership Award in Intelligence and Security Informatics (2020), the Operational Research Society's Stafford Beer Medal (2018), National Science Foundation's CAREER award in 2010, and many best paper awards and nominations at various conferences.