University of Michigan School of Information
Jane Im’s mission to advance affirmative consent in tech
Tuesday, 10/15/2024
Jane Im remembers an ad she saw on the subway a decade ago, when she was a business undergraduate in Seoul, South Korea. Though the details have faded, the ad was related to feminism. She was still thinking about it on her long escalator ride out of the station.
“At the time, feminism wasn't discussed that much in Korea. And it was actually — it still is, I think — negatively portrayed in mainstream media,” Im says. “But I remember thinking about feminism as an undergrad and also my own lived experiences of dating men and understanding that many people still don’t know how to communicate consent or understand each other’s consent boundaries.”
A PhD candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Im uses the framework of consent to design and build social computing systems, including social media platforms, that give users more agency and protect their boundaries.
In 2023 — 10 years after that train ride — Im’s research was featured in The Wall Street Journal. She made a case for giving social media users more control over the ads they see.
“Consenting to someone or something is very prevalent in our lives,” Im notes. “But in human-computer interaction at the time I started my PhD, understanding how to improve social computing systems from the lens of consent, to tackle problems like online harassment or privacy issues — that had been less explored.”
These days, most social media companies only consider consent in relation to data privacy. Think of the little box you check after the Terms of Service, for example, or the pop-up that invites you to “accept all cookies.” Both are forms of consent.
But Im takes this a level deeper by using the theory of affirmative consent — which she defines as “voluntary, informed, specific, revertible and unburdensome” — to design better social computing systems.
Her research is inspired by feminist scholarship, community organizers like Una Lee (founder of the Consentful Tech Project) and scholars like Shaowen Bardzell who are working at the intersection of human-computer interaction and gender studies.
So, what does affirmative consent look like in practice? One example, her proudest, is a system she built called Moa. Its goal is to facilitate information sharing among PhD students who are experiencing mistreatment or abuse in academia.
Moa allows users to define their consent boundaries for each post they make, mitigating the risks they might face by sharing their experiences. “A user can set a post to be visible to PhD students who are only international students, or they can share information about gender discrimination to only women students,” Im explains.
When she chose UMSI for her PhD in Information, this is what she saw herself doing: “I wanted to choose what kind of projects I worked on, and I wanted to create something.”
She says her advisor Kentaro Toyama has helped make this possible. “His strength is that he knows how to understand and amplify each PhD student’s strength,” Im says. “And I think he understood immediately that I value freedom in my research.” Toyama also taught her that empathy and concern for justice could be advantages — not hindrances — when it comes to research.
Though she doesn’t lead with it, Im carries an impressive list of accomplishments. This fall, she was selected to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which brings together some of the brightest minds in math and computer science from across the globe — young researchers and laureates alike. At U-M, she is a Barbour Scholar, one of the oldest and most prestigious awards granted by the university.
If that weren’t enough, Im was selected as a Meta Research PhD Fellow in 2023. The fellowship, awarded to 21 PhD candidates from a pool of more than 3,200, recognizes PhD candidates conducting cutting-edge research across computer science, engineering and behavioral science.
Im is quick to note it was her fourth time applying. She is invested in supporting fellow PhD students, and she believes in being transparent about failures as well as successes.
While many emerging researchers see industry as the best way to make an impact, Im — who is currently on the market for a tenure-track job in her field — gently pushes back on this notion. She knows academic research can influence the tech industry and government policy alike; it’s all about how you communicate your research with people outside of academia.
On this front, she has learned a lot from associate professor of information Florian Schaub, who collaborated with her on that WSJ-featured paper about ad controls. Schaub encouraged her to submit this research to PrivacyCon 2024, where it was accepted, and this past March she presented their findings in front of tech policymakers and regulators.
“I have a feeling that UMSI really wants to nurture scholars,” Im says. “I think UMSI wants PhD students to succeed.
“I felt like I never fit in business or computer science. I felt like I was someone who's not in either discipline. And I think that's why information drew me in: Oh, you're not perceived as a weirdo in a school like this. You can work on anything as long as it's related to information.”
In that “anything,” Im has found incredible momentum. It’s balanced with something more enduring: patience. Her research is born not just from the urge to create, but the urge to create technology that empowers its users and improves their lives.
Whether this impact comes fast or slow, in tech policy or product design, through her research or through students she might someday mentor — she’s in it for the long haul.
—Abigail McFee, marketing and communications writer
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