Problem Statement
How might we meet the needs of local Ithaca tenants in creating an ethical, private, safe, and functional digital communication platform for tenants and organizers to communicate about housing?
Students from the Milstein program had the opportunity to learn about housing inequity last summer during their time at Cornell Tech. As part of this exploration, teams designed policy proposals for the Mayor’s Office and NYCEDC, one of which centered on creating such a platform. This project was an iteration to try to create such a platform for Ithaca tenants rights organizing.
Background Information
When forming policies to propose to the NYC Mayor’s Office, the concept of a social media platform for tenants was a central focus: creating a way for tenants to communicate with each other, to discuss their situations as tenants free from prying eyes, and to gain confidence to pursue their rights and to learn their rights from tenants associations.
To achieve this level of privacy and security, this project was inspired by Going Against the (Appropriate) Flow, a project that attempted to fit the framework of contextual integrity (a way to understand privacy) onto privacy policies of companies like Facebook and Twitter. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these policies did not outline with sufficient specificity the new, and maybe undesirable, flows of personal information that using the product would create. This gave me the idea to, instead of applying a frame- work of privacy after the platform was created, build the platform around the framework.
Ethnographic interviews seemed like a perfect tool for finding both appropriate flows of information along with finding which needs can be addressed with this new platform.
Research Focus
Project Construction and Methodology
| Research |
Research for this project consisted of identifying extant papers concerned with trusted and secure channels of communications in various contexts online or offline. |
| Ethnographic Interviews |
Interviews conducted focused on the experiences of tenants—particularly those who have had troubles with housing as a result of miscommunication or troubles with landlords. Interviews were conducted in person and recorded. |
|
Analysis + Synthesis |
After the interviews were transcribed, the transcripts were analyzed for trends relating to measures of trust, confidence and mode of communication. In synthesizing these trends, valuable information about privacy preferences can easily be applied to a multitude of communication methods such as community guidelines in a virtual classroom setting. |
|
Outlining Structure of Platform |
Finally, once we determine what features and flows of information are necessary for the platform, we can design a structure that will accommodate what we have learned is necessary from our synthesis. |
Interviewee Conversation Modeled Within Contextual Integrity (CI) Framework
| CI Characteristic | Description |
|---|---|
| Context | Healthcare |
| Sender | Interviewee |
| Subject | Interviewee |
| Recipient | Mental Health Professional |
| Type | Experience with Landlord |
| Transmission | Recipient is bound by healthcare protocol including client-patient confidentiality |
- Subject was scared of posting about their troubles on social media because they felt their landlord might see it and retaliate.
- Subject felt more comfortable posting under a pseudonym or anonymous account than with their real name and image
- Subject researched and solved their problem by themselves, due to a lack of a support network
- Subject’s needs did not match any social media network they used at that time
Results
Observations
- Subject was scared of posting about their troubles on social media because they felt their landlord might see it and retaliate.
- Subject felt more comfortable posting under a pseudonym or anonymous account than with their real name and image
- Subject researched and solved their problem by themselves, due to a lack of a support network
- Subject’s needs did not match any social media network they used at that time
Insights
- Anonymity is preferred when posting information about oneself, but not preferred when receiving advice from a stranger’s account
- Subject and Sender should not be the same to preserve privacy when the type of information is current/ongoing
- There is interest in a platform that would provide anonymity while allowing for a community to exist, to make tenants feel less alone, that would allow most people but not everyone in Ithaca to join
Lessons
- It was incredibly difficult to find organizations to partner with and subjects to interview that matched our ideal demographics
- It took two months of communication to get on a Zoom call with the Ithaca Tenants Union
Milstein Student
Citations
Nissenbaum, H. (2009). Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford University Press.
Shaffer, G. (2021). Applying a Contextual Integrity Framework to Privacy Policies for Smart Technologies. Journal of Information Policy, 222-265.
Shvartzshnaider, Y., Apthorpe, N., Feamster, N., & Nissenbaum, H. (2019). Going against the (Appropriate) Flow: A Contextual Integrity Approach to Privacy Policy Analysis . Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, 162-170.
Shvartshnaider, Y. [@ynotez]. (2020, April 15). The ABC of Contextual Integrity [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/ynotez/status/1250578500588879873
Ziewitz, M. (2016). Experience in action: Moderating care in web-based patient feedback. Social Science & Medicine, 99-108.