Call for Papers
1st Security and Privacy for Asian Internet Communities Workshop (SPAIC)
Dates
- Submission deadline: TBD
- Acceptance notification: TBD
- Workshop: TBD
About
Human-centered security and privacy emerge from how people live with and adapt technologies in specific cultural, social, and economic environments.
In Asia, these environments are not only vast and varied but also fast-changing.
The region’s scale, diversity, and speed of digital adoption make it a crucial site for advancing human-centered perspectives on security and privacy.
What sets Asian contexts apart is not a single defining feature, but the intersection of many factors: the prominence of mobile-first access, multilingual and multicultural user bases, the widespread reliance on biometric and identity infrastructures, and the coexistence of high-tech urban centers with resource-constrained rural areas.
These dynamics shape how threats are perceived, how protective measures are adopted, and what ``security'' and ``privacy'' mean in practice.
Existing research in usable security and privacy often assumes models of individual ownership, consistent infrastructure, and relatively homogeneous user expectations, assumptions that do not always hold in Asia.
For example:
- Threat models (and in general risk-benefit trade off for privacy/security related decision making) often overlook how cultural and social norms shape the negotiation of privacy in families, workplaces, and communities.
- Concepts of individual vs. communal privacy vary across cultures, complicating consent and data-sharing models.
- Authentication and identity management are heavily tied to biometrics and national ID systems.
- Security advice that assumes disposable income is infeasible with socio-economic constraints.
In response to these challenges, this workshop seeks to bring together researchers, designers and practitioners to explore human-centered security and privacy needs in Asian contexts as well as explore the suitability of existing systems to address those needs.
We aim to foster discussion and collaboration around the unique experiences, practices, and needs of the region's diverse user populations, while bridging insights from usable security, privacy, HCI and social sciences.
Submission Instructions
We invite contributions in the form of:
- Position Papers (1-2 pages): raising new problems, perspectives, or conceptual framings rooted in Asian contexts.
- Short Papers (4–6 pages): presenting early-stage empirical studies, prototypes, methodological contributions, or design explorations relevant to users in Asia.
Topics of Interest
We welcome submissions on a broad set of topics, including but not limited to:
- Usability, adoption, and deployment of security and privacy tools in Asia
- Psychological and sociological aspects of security and privacy in Asian societies
- Cultural and social diversity in designing usable security systems
- Economic trade-offs: how affordability, access, and infrastructure shape security behaviors
- Privacy practices in family, work, and community contexts where devices are shared
- Trust, safety, and risk perception across different communities
- Case studies of authentication, payments, or platform trust
- Failures and lessons learned from real-world security deployments in Asian contexts
- Unique impact of emerging technologies like AI on security, privacy and safety decision making in Asian context