If you’re someone with disabilities needing help with your online privacy and computer access needs, a family member or practitioner who supports people with disabilities or a scholar seeking information about online privacy for underserved populations, a new information resource is available.
Inclusiveprivacy.org is a comprehensive website developed and curated by the Social Computing Systems Lab at the School of Information Studies (iSchool). The site is an outgrowth of the research work of Assistant Professor Yang Wang and the lab’s team of iSchool faculty and student researchers. Wang leads the project as principal investigator with a grant from the National Science Foundation and additional funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.
The site is intended to provide information and assistance to people with disabilities of all kinds in order to help them improve the privacy of their computer use and their access to online security mechanisms. It is a component of Wang’s three-part research project on inclusive privacy, whose goal is to work toward achieving more effective privacy mechanisms for the widest range of people possible. “Privacy or security mechanisms are usually designed with the generic population in mind,” the site notes, and these “often fall short of supporting many under-studied or marginalized sub-populations.”