Please note: This master’s thesis presentation will take place in DC 3317.
Shanza Shanza, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisors: Professors Urs Hengartner, Leah Zhang Kennedy
In collectivist households, sharing digital devices is both a cultural norm and often necessary. After migration to more individualistic cultures such as Canada, these sharing practices persist but become entangled with new cultural norms and highly digitized systems. We report findings from a qualitative study of 18 nuclear families (19 parents, 22 children) mainly from South-Asia examining how migration and sociocultural factors shape security and privacy risks in multi-user households and how current devices support or hinder safe sharing. Shared-device use exposed families to data breaches, reputational harms, cultural and religious boundary violations, and intergenerational tensions. At the same time, coping strategies were often fragile or abandoned when they threatened family harmony. Our findings reveal a structural mismatch between single-user device assumptions and collectivist immigrants’ household realities. Designing for shared-device contexts is therefore essential for building more inclusive digital infrastructures that support multicultural families and others who rely on device sharing.