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Consent is fundamentally about ensuring that individuals—especially those with less power—have the agency to decide whether and how an interaction should occur. For example, sex education emphasizes that only after a person who may be more vulnerable—due to factors like physical differences and social norms—grants consent, should the other party try to initiate a sexual interaction. In short, the essence of consent is ensuring that the weakest power-holder can exercise their agency.
This dissertation explores the ways, values, and limitations of taking a consent-centered approach to developing digital technologies. Specifically, I theorize and empirically demonstrate how centering the consent of users, who often hold less power than system creators, results in designing and building a new class of systems that better support users’ nuanced needs around privacy, safety, and agency.
I first propose a theoretical framework of affirmative consent, which I define as being voluntary, informed, specific, revertible, and unburdensome. Drawing from this framework, I develop concrete designs for social media systems that prioritize giving users more agency over their online interactions and data. These designs show that the affirmative consent framework is useful for rethinking many of the traditional assumptions made by system creators, which are often legalistic or engineering-driven.
In the remaining part of the thesis, I present two systems projects where I design, build, and deploy specific interfaces and systems that better respect users’ consent. First, I focus on the problem of social platforms not giving users findable advertisement settings. Ad settings are among the most basic consent-granting mechanisms for user data. However, research shows that many users are unaware of these settings, due to their poor findability. To address this, I redesigned advertisement control interfaces, guided by the affirmative consent framework. I implemented and deployed these interfaces on Facebook using a Chrome extension, and conducted an online experiment to evaluate their effectiveness. The results showed that the framework is practically implementable and that users appreciated the redesigned controls.
That work primarily shows the affirmative consent framework improving the usability of consent-granting interfaces, but the framework extends beyond usability. In the next chapter, I apply it to a complex, interpersonal context: I designed and built a novel social media platform called Moa (모아), which aims to enable sensitive information-sharing around problematic power dynamics. Moa introduces a set of consent-based features; among them, the most novel element is called the “consent boundary”—a mechanism that enables users to anonymously specify who can view their posts or comments, based on contextual attributes that existing permission models do not provide, such as lived experience or social identities. A 3-week field study in two PhD programs showed that Moa’s users engaged in a range of sensitive conversations about PhD advising relationships, and that the consent boundaries lowered the barrier to participation for some users. This chapter overall demonstrates that consent-centered systems can enable risky discussions required for social change, by giving users the agency to define their own conditions of engagement.
In sum, this dissertation contributes a theoretical framework and empirical evidence of a consent-centered approach to systems design. At its most radical, the affirmative consent approach challenges dominant assumptions held by system creators, and asserts that users should have mechanisms to freely configure systems on their own terms—mechanisms that go beyond access and privacy controls.