Abstract: Privacy is a fundamental human right and essential to agency and trust in the AI era. Yet as technologies continuously collect and infer personal data, many people lack the knowledge, critical thinking, and decision-making skills needed to navigate privacy risks. Strengthening these dimensions requires not only awareness, but also supportive design, education, and community structures. In this talk, I will introduce a human-centered, socio-technical approach to advancing privacy literacy. I will present a few examples in which we help users align privacy decisions with their personal preferences and privacy goals through adaptive interface design. I will also highlight our community-based education initiatives that extend privacy literacy to families, educators, and local organizations. These efforts position privacy literacy as both a research framework and a practical strategy and empower individuals and communities to engage with digital technologies more confidently and responsibly.
Bio: Dr. Yaxing Yao is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), privacy and security, and AI, focusing on exploring privacy issues in user interactions with computing systems and developing solutions to empower users to be aware and control their privacy. He has published in top HCI venues (e.g., ACM CHI, ACM CSCW) and privacy/security venues (e.g., USENIX Security, SOUPS) and has received multiple paper awards, an NSF CAREER award, a Google PSS Faculty Research Award, and two Meta Research Awards. Yao’s work has influenced public policy, including the opt-out icon in the California Consumer Privacy Act. He also founded KidsTeam, a program that engages K-12 students in privacy research through weekly design workshops and summer camps. Yao’s research is supported by the NSF, Google, and Meta.