Sauvik Das

20 Nov 2024

I created a starter pack for researchers who work at the nexus of HCI & cybersecurity / privacy here. Please do let me know if you would like to be added to the list!I'm sure I've missed many folks. go.bsky.app/RGsu5jn

New #UIST2026 paper led by @yuxuanli1225.bsky.social WhatIf lets policymakers steer, inspect, and compare large-scale LLM-powered social simulations in real time. It helped emergency professionals recognize previously unrecognized planning vulnerabilities. Paper: sauvikdas.com/papers/74/se...

New #AIES2026 paper led by @hankhplee: Agentic AI devs focus on product and business risks over downstream risks like job displacement and privacy. Lacking mature controls, they contain risk by constraining the same capabilities that make agents useful. sauvikdas.com/papers/73/s...

Sauvik Das reposted

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee

@hankhplee.bsky.social

12 Aug

📣 New paper alert 📣 What if AI agents' biggest strength is also their biggest risk? "The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products" (#AIES2026) 📑 hankhplee.com/papers/aies2... 🧵1/9

businessinsider.comThere are 3 telltale signs that you used AI to make your app — and they aren't prettyIn a sea of cookie-cutter vibe-coded apps, it's getting harder to stand out. Here's what you can change in yours to set yourself apart.

10 July

Spoke to Aditi Bharade from Business Insider about how to identify AI slop apps: www.businessinsider.com/ai-coded-ap...

apply.interfolio.com Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

6 July

I stopped using Google Analytics on my site almost 10 years ago because I didn't want to contribute to even more cookie-based tracking. Over the weekend, I used a Claude loop to set up self-hosted, cookieless analytics and I'm...pleasantly surprised that it worked so well.

Sauvik Das reposted

Sean Munson

@smunson.com

2 July

We are hiring an assistant professor to join @hcde.uw.edu in Autumn 2027. We welcome applications in all areas, with a focus on: (1) Environment and sustainability; (2) Civic infrastructure and society; (3) Labor and the future of work. Learn more & apply: apply.interfolio.com/188238

Sauvik Das reposted

sorelle

@friedler.net

26 June

Are you curious about the environmental impact of AI? Install the AI Impact Tracker to estimate the environmental footprint of your ChatGPT usage, including energy, water, and CO2. chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-im... #FAccT2026

chromewebstore.google.comchromewebstore.google.com

Sauvik Das reposted

Serge Egelman

@v0max.bsky.social

22 June

Now available on SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

papers.ssrn.comAnonymity, Consent, And Other Noble Lies: An Empirical Study of The Data EconomyWhile legal scholars have cited decades of computer science research that demonstrates why anonymity is hard (and that datasets should not be labelled as "

Serge Egelman@v0max.bsky.social

This paper (abstract below) on the lies the adtech/data broker industry tells courts has finally been published: yjolt.org/anonymity-co... Joint work with Joel Reardon at U Calgary and Ken Bamberger and Laurel McGrane at Berkeley Law. 1/

Sauvik Das reposted

Mark Riedl

@markriedl.bsky.social

9 June

Replying to @markriedl.bsky.social

In 2019 it took 6 months for GPT-2 to go from too-dangerous to release. Claude Mythos/Fable ran that cycle in 2 months. The AI PR singularity is amongst us. In 2029, there will be zero latency between a company saying a model is too dangerous and it being released.

Sauvik Das reposted

Willie Agnew

@willie-agnew.bsky.social

12 May

Our work on how gen ai is impacting the labor conditions and power of professional visual artists got a great writeup from Brian Merchant! www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-inf...

bloodinthemachine.comThe AI-inflected crisis artists are facing, in 4 chartsAn alarming new study reveals the dire impact AI is having on artists' livelihoods. It does offer some hope, too.

Sauvik Das reposted

arxiv.orgSystematic Failures in Collective Reasoning under Distributed Information in Multi-Agent LLMsMulti-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) are expected to enhance decision-making by pooling distributed information, yet systematically evaluating this capability has remained challen...

30 Apr

Excited to share that our paper has been accepted to 𝗜𝗖𝗠𝗟 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲! 🎉 Multi-agent is everywhere today. But put frontier LLMs in a room where each holds a different piece of the puzzle, and they fail 70% of the time. Here's why: 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.11556

Christos Argyropoulos MD, PhD, FASN 🇺🇸 0kale/acc

24 Apr

When was the last time you read a paper end-to-end for non-reviewing purposes? Seems like we write more than ever and read less than ever. (I'm guilty too) GenAI tools are kind of like a ddos attack on our attention. Far too much being produced to handle and justify consuming.

Sauvik Das reposted

@christosargyrop.bsky.social

20 Apr

#oopsie Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthrop...

thatprivacyguy.comAnthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop — That Privacy Guy!Anthropic's Claude Desktop silently installs a Native Messaging bridge into seven Chromium browsers, including browsers Anthropic's own documentation says it does not support, and browsers the user ha...

Sauvik Das reposted

CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute

@hcii.cmu.edu

15 Apr

Carnegie Mellon University authors from 12 different @cmu.edu depts contributed to 76 #CHI2026 papers: 🛠️ New tools & systems 🧠 New frameworks & taxonomies ☑️ New ways to audit tech 🆕 New advancements in Accessibility, Health, Design & so much more... Details here: hcii.cmu.edu/news/cmu-chi...

Sauvik Das reposted

11 Apr

Excited to be heading to Barcelona for #CHI2026 to host our workshop PoliSim: LLM Agent Simulation for Policy! This year, we’ve seen incredible interest from researchers across HCI, NLP, CSS, and Policy. We accepted 25 outstanding papers, with 5 selected as Best Paper nominees.

31 Mar

The overleaf git project for one of my #uist2026 submissions was assigned a uuid starting with "67". I believe this lets me mine the latest block on the gen alpha blockchain using the "Proof of Relevance" protocol. Who should I speak with about this

Sauvik Das reposted

Jay Van Bavel, PhD

@jayvanbavel.bsky.social

17 Mar

Will AI become a confirmation bias machine? AI can be a powerful tool for truth-seeking. Yet, people might prefer to use AI to confirm their pre-existing beliefs, and features of AI systems (eg sycophancy) may make AI effective at justifying what people want to believe. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Sauvik Das reposted

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee

@hankhplee.bsky.social

14 Mar

Really excited that “Privy” received a CHI ’26 Honorable Mention Award 🏅 Privy is part of my PhD work on AI privacy: understanding AI privacy risks, studying why they’re hard to address in practice, and building tools that help product teams act on them.

Sauvik Das@sauvik.me

📣 New at #CHI2026 Developing a new AI product? How would you figure out what are the privacy risks? Privy help non-privacy expert practitioners create high quality privacy impact assessments for early-stage AI products. Led by @hankhplee.bsky.social Paper: www.sauvik.me/papers/69/s...

13 Mar

I am working on a UX audit agent for my company (fuguux.com/). I passed in the output of our audit agent into Claude code for my personal website and...voila, a refreshed and much better site. Surprised it worked! Before -> after sauvik.me

404media.coCBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ MovementsAn internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar t...

9 Mar

An exciting development: Privy was recognized with a best paper honorable mention at #chi2026! Congrats to the whole team, including: @hankhplee.bsky.social @kyzyl.me @jodiforlizzi.bsky.social

Sauvik Das@sauvik.me

Sauvik Das reposted

404 Media

@404media.co

3 Mar

SCOOP: An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. This surveillance can happen through all sorts of apps, such as video games, news apps, weather trackers, and dating apps.

2 Mar

Honored to be named Privacy co-chair of ACM's U.S. Technology Policy Committee with @benwinters.bsky.social On that note: please read USTPC's statement discouraging adtech vendors from sharing personal data with DHS/ICE.

ACM Policy Committees@acmpolicy.bsky.social

New statement from the ACM U.S. Technology Policy Committee on AdTech & DHS privacy/security: computing experts urge stronger safeguards around government use of advertising-tech data collection. #Privacy #Security #TechPolicy acm.org/binaries/con...

Data collected for advertising should not be repurposed for government surveillance or tracking. This secondary use of personal data violates contextual integrity and breaches basic data minimization by turning commercially gathered information into a general investigate resource

2 Mar

This is functionally an end-run around judicial oversight and due process, transforming consumer data into a tool for tracking and enforcement while inevitably sweeping in non-targets, including U.S. citizens and lawful residents.

2 Mar

ACM Policy Committees@acmpolicy.bsky.social

In January, ICE/DHS put out an RFI on how companies with “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products can “directly support investigations activities.” This effort would go against the best practice of minimizing data collection as a safeguard against misuse.

Sauvik Das reposted

25 Feb

Can LLMs really serve as "crash dummies" for security & privacy testing? We put this assumption to the test. 🚨New preprint 🚨: "How Well Can LLM Agents Simulate End-User Security and Privacy Attitudes and Behaviors?" 👇 THREAD 👇 [Link to paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.184... [1/n]

arxiv.orgarxiv.org

Sauvik Das reposted

ACM Policy Committees

@acmpolicy.bsky.social

24 Feb

acm.orgacm.org

Sauvik Das reposted

13 Feb

🚨New paper🚨 We spent a year working with emergency preparedness policymakers to answer a simple question: can LLM agent simulations actually help real institutions make better decisions? The answer is yes—but perhaps not how you'd expect. 👇 THREAD 👇 [Link to paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.218... [1/n]

📣 New at #CHI2026 People share sensitive things “anonymously”… but anonymity is hard to reason about. What if we could quantify re-identification risk with AI? How should we present those AI-estimated risks to users? Led by my student Isadora Krsek Paper: www.sauvik.me/papers/70/s...

(1) Pair risk flags with actionable guidance (how to preserve intent, reduce risk) (2) Explain plausible attacker exploits (not just “risk: high”) (3) Communicate risk without pushing unnecessary self-censorship (4) Use intuitive language/visuals; avoid jargon

In short: Quantifying privacy risks can help users make more informed decisions—but the UX needs to present risks in a manner that is interpretable and actionable to truly *empower* users, rather than scare them. Thanks @NSF for supporting this work!

…but sometimes PREs encouraged self-censorship. A meaningful chunk of reflections ended with deleting the post, not posting at all, or even leaving the platform.

Interestingly, no single UI for presenting PREs to users “won”. Participants didn’t show a strong overall preference across the five designs (though “risk by disclosure” tended to be liked more; the meter less). So what *should* PRE designs do? 4 design recommendations:

Finding #1: PREs often *shifted perspective*. In ~74% of reflections, participants expected higher privacy awareness / risk concern. …but awareness came with emotional costs. Many participants anticipated anxiety, frustration, or feeling stuck about trade-offs.

Finding #2: PREs drove action (often good!). In 66% of reflections, participants envisioned the user editing the post. Most commonly: “evasive but still expressive” edits (change details, generalize, remove a pinpoint).

Method: speculative design + design fictions. We storyboarded 5 PRE UI concepts using comic-boards (different ways to show risk + what’s driving it).

The 5 concepts ranged from: (1) raw k-anonymity score (2) a re-identifiability “meter” (3) low/med/high simplified risk (4) threat-specific risk (5) “risk by disclosure” (which details contribute most)

This paper explores how to present “population risk estimates” (PREs): an AI-driven estimate of how uniquely identifiable you are based on your disclosures. Smaller “k” means you're more identifiable (e.g., k=1 means only 1 person matches everything you have disclosed)