Arvind Narayanan and I are pleased to announce that the Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro ’19) will return for a third year! The workshop will once again be co-located with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, occurring in May 2019.
ConPro is a forum for a diverse range of computer science research with consumer protection implications. Last year, papers covered topics ranging from online dating fraud to the readability of security guidance. Panelists and invited speakers explored topics from preventing caller-ID spoofing to protecting unique communities.
We see ConPro as a workshop in the classic sense, providing substantive feedback and new ideas. Presentations have sparked suggestions for follow-up work and collaboration opportunities. Attendees represent a wide range of research areas, spurring creative ideas and interesting conversation. For example, comments about crowdworker concerns this year led to discussion of best practices for research making use of those workers.
Although our community has grown, we aim to keep discussion and feedback a central part of the workshop. Our friends in the legal community have had some success with larger events focused on feedback and discussion, such as PLSC. We plan to take lessons from those cases.
The success of ConPro in past years—amazing research, attendees, discussion, and PCs—makes us excited for next year. The call for papers lists some relevant topics, but if you do computer science research with consumer protection implications, it’s relevant (but be sure those implications are clear). The submission deadline is January 23, 2019. We hope you’ll submit a paper and join us in San Francisco!
