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Educational technologies are revolutionizing how educational institutions operate. Consequently, it makes them a lucrative target for breach and abuse as they often serve as centralized hubs for diverse types of sensitive data, from academic records to health information. Existing studies looked into how existing stakeholders perceive the security and privacy risks of educational technologies and how those risks are affecting institutional policies for acquiring new technologies. However, outside of institutional vetting and approval, there is a pervasive practice of using applications and devices acquired personally. It is unclear how these applications and devices affect the dynamics of the overall institutional ecosystem. This study aims to address this gap by understanding why instructors use unsanctioned applications, how instructors perceive the associated risks, and how it affects institutional security and privacy postures. We designed and conducted an online survey-based study targeting instructors and administrators from K-12 and higher education institutions.

The education technology (EdTech) landscape is expanding rapidly in higher education institutes (HEIs). This growth brings enormous complexity. Protecting the extensive data collected by these tools is crucial for HEIs as data breaches and misuses can have dire security and privacy consequences on the data subjects, particularly students, who are often compelled to use these tools. This urges an in-depth understanding of HEI and EdTech vendor dynamics, which is largely understudied. To address this gap, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 13 participants who are in EdTech leadership roles at seven HEIs. Our study uncovers the EdTech acquisition process in the HEI context, the consideration of security and privacy issues throughout that process, the pain points of HEI personnel in establishing adequate protection mechanisms in service contracts, and their struggle in holding vendors accountable due to a lack of visibility into their system and power-asymmetry, among other reasons. We discuss certain observations about the status quo and conclude with recommendations for HEIs, researchers, and regulatory bodies to improve the situation.

With over 1.5 million content creators, OnlyFans is one of the fastest growing subscription-based social media platforms. The platform is primarily associated with sexual content. Thus, OnlyFans creators are uniquely positioned at the intersection of professional social media content creation and sex work. While the experiences and motivations of experienced sex workers to adopt OnlyFans have been studied, in this work we seek to understand the motivations of creators who had not previously done sex work. Through a qualitative interview study of 22 U.S.-based OnlyFans creators, we find that beyond the typical motivations for pursuing gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), our participants were motivated by three key factors: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans; (2) platform design and affordances such as boundary setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives; and (3) the pandemic, as OnlyFans provided an enormous opportunity to overcome lockdown-related issues.