Publications

2024

1. Community, Privacy

   

   Designing Gig Worker Sousveillance Tools

   Maya De Los Santos^*, Kimberly Do^*, Michael Muller, and 1 more author

   In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, USA, 2024

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   As independently-contracted employees, gig workers disproportionately suffer the consequences of workplace surveillance, which include increased pressures to work, breaches of privacy, and decreased digital autonomy. Despite the negative impacts of workplace surveillance, gig workers lack the tools, strategies, and workplace social support to protect themselves against these harms. Meanwhile, some critical theorists have proposed sousveillance as a potential means of countering such abuses of power, whereby those under surveillance monitor those in positions of authority (e.g., gig workers collect data about requesters/platforms). To understand the benefits of sousveillance systems in the gig economy, we conducted semi-structured interviews and led co-design activities with gig workers. We use “care ethics” as a guiding concept to understand our interview and co-design data, while also focusing on empathic sousveillance technology design recommendations. Through our study we identify gig workers’ attitudes towards and past experiences with sousveillance. We also uncover the type of sousveillance technologies imagined by workers, provide design recommendations, and finish by discussing how to create empowering, empathic spaces on gig platforms.

2. Community

   

   Mapping the Crowdsourcing Workforce in Latin America and the Caribbean

   Gianna Williams, Maya De Los Santos, Alexandra To, and 1 more author

   In Mexican International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2024

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   Research has primarily focused on understanding the perspectives and experiences of US based crowdworkers, leaving a notable gap to those within the Global South. To bridge this, we conducted a survey with 100 crowdworkers across 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. To understand the tensions between the crowdworking economy abroad. In our study we found crowd work being the stepping stone to financial and professional independence among those we surveyed along with the tensions within data extraction among crowdworkers.

2023

1. Community

   

   La Independiente: Designing Ubiquitous Systems for Latin American and Caribbean Women Crowdworkers

   Maya De Los Santos, Norma Elva Chávez, Alberto Navarrete, and 4 more authors

   In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing & the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing, Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, 2023

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   Since 2018, Venezuelans have contributed to 75% of leading AI crowd work platforms’ total workforce [15], and it is very likely other Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries will follow in the context of the post covid-19 economic recovery [7]. While crowd work presents new opportunities for employment in regions of the world where local economies have stagnated[11], few initiatives have investigated the impact of such work in the Global South through the lens of feminist theory. To address this knowledge gap, we surveyed 55 LAC women on the crowd work platform Toloka to understand their personal goals, professional values, and hardships faced in their work. Our findings demonstrated that a vital component lacking from the experiences of these women was a sense of connection with one another. Based on these observations, we propose a system designed to foster community between LAC women in crowd work to improve their personal and professional advancement.

2. Community

   

   La Independiente: an AI-enhanced Platform Co-Designed with Latin-American Crowd-Workers

   Maya De Los Santos^*, José Emilio Garcı́a^*, Norma Elva Chávez, and 6 more authors

   In Avances en Interacción Humano-Computadora, 2023

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   Crowd-work has increased significantly in recent years, particularly among women from Latin America. However, the specific needs and characteristics of this workforce have not been studied nearly enough. For this reason, we have conducted a series of surveys, questionnaires, and design sessions directly with Latin-American users of crowd-working platforms. Our aim was to create a system to empower crowd-workers with AI enhanced tools for their day-to-day tasks. As a result, we created a customized platform, La Independiente, and two web plugins. This project is unique in that it leverages gender perspective methodologies, AI powered-systems, and public policy analysis to design smart tools that are both professionally useful and culturally relevant.

2022

1. Privacy

   

   The TikTok Tradeoff: Compelling Algorithmic Content at the Expense of Personal Privacy

   Maya De Los Santos , and Daniel Klug

   In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, Leuven, Belgium, 2022

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   This paper presents results of an interview study with twelve TikTok users to explore user awareness, perception, and experiences with the app’s algorithm in the context of privacy. TikTok collects user data to cater individualized video feeds based on users’ engagement with presented content which is regulated in a complex and overly long privacy policy. Our results demonstrate that participants generally have very little knowledge of the actual privacy regulations which is argued for with the benefit of receiving free entertaining content. However, participants experienced privacy-related downsides when algorithmically catered video content increasingly adapted to their biography, interests, or location and they in turn realized the detail of personal data that TikTok had access to. This illustrates the tradeoff users have to make between allowing TikTok to access their personal data and having favorable video consumption experiences on the app.

2. Community

   

   Mainstreaming Gender Perspective in AI Crowd Work in the Global South: Diagnostic, policy recommendations and smart tools for women’s empowerment

   Cristina Martínez Pinto, Luz Elena González, Tatiana Telles, and 4 more authors

   2022

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