Microsoft Research Lab – Africa, Nairobi

Join Dr Collins Munyendo (opens in new tab) for our seminar on 24th September where he will present on:

Security and Privacy in the Underserved Majority World: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities

Recent developments in security and privacy have emphasized the need to consider human factors in security and privacy research and design. However, most of the existing body of work has focused on Western populations, particularly in the US and Europe, despite other research showing that security and privacy perceptions and practices vary across countries and cultures. Consequently, the security and privacy solutions designed and evaluated in the West can quickly fall apart when used or applied to other regions in the “majority world,” leaving end-users at risk. 

In this talk, Collins will draw from a series of studies across the majority world to highlight unique security and privacy challenges. The first part will focus on Kenya, examining privacy tensions with mobile loan applications and cybercafes. The second part will go beyond Kenya to show how these challenges recur across other majority world contexts. Finally, he will discuss solutions to these challenges before sharing promising directions for future work.

Speaker Bio:

Collins Munyendo is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and an Incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on human-centered security and privacy. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the John Karat Student Research Award, a Google PhD Fellowship, a Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE S&P, the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award, and a Top Reviewer Award at CCS. Previously, he earned his PhD in Computer Science at the George Washington University.