Welcome to the Privacy & Sociotechnical Systems Rhythm Lab!
We explore the intersection of technology, society, and ethics to design privacy solutions that are meaningful, usable, and trustworthy.
Our work combines technical tools, policy analysis, and social research to help systems respect people's expectations and values.
Research Interests (see selected publications)
- Usable privacy
- Sociotechnical systems
- Contextual Integrity: Theory and Applications
- Information Technology Policy
We are grateful for the support:
News
-
🆕 Presenting at PETS'26
Professor Shvartzshnaider presented the paper co-authored with Vasisht Duddu on "Privacy Bias in Language Models: A Contextual Integrity-based Auditing Metric" at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) in Calgary! Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are integrated into sociotechnical systems, it is crucial to examine the privacy biases they exhibit. We define privacy bias
-
Policy-Relevant Privacy Research Workshop @ PETS 2026
Professor Shvartzshnaider gave a talk on "Privacy Inserts" titled: "Doing Away with Privacy Preferences: Towards Privacy Inserts" at the Policy-Relevant Privacy Research Workshop at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) in Calgary Talk Abstract:
-
The 8th Annual PrivaCI Symposium
Professor Shvartzshnaider co-organized the 8th Annual PrivaCI Symposium took place on June 24-25, 2026 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The symposium fostered interaction among diverse communities of research and practice using Contextual Integrity to reason about privacy, design and evaluate, craft regulation, and generate formal logics for privacy. https://privaci.info/symposium/2026/program.html
-
🆕 Paper in PLSC 2026
Paper on "Governing Generative AI Use in Universities: A Comparative Study of Policies in the United States, Canada, and China" co-authored Chengyuan Liang and Prof Kean Birch was accepted and discussed in PLSC 2026. "We compare how 101 top universities in North America and Greater China translate privacy and other legal-technical constraints into genAI governance…