Ada Lerner

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

• Khoury College of Computer Sciences
  Northeastern University
  Boston, MA 02115
• ada@ccs.neu.edu
• Curriculum Vitae (CV): That's a royal word for "Resumé".
• Google Scholar
• My pronouns are they/them or she/her.
  Use they/them if you can't decide.

About

Unfortunately, I am not actively recruiting students and postdocs this year. While I am generally excited to connect with potential lab members and collaborators, I will be on parental leave for the 2024-2025 academic year, so I am unlikely to respond to recruiting inquires at this time.

My research is broadly within the area of usable security and privacy with a particular focus in several areas, including privacy law, communities' privacy perceptions and norms, and the computer security and privacy needs of those who are marginalized or vulnerable. My methods include qualitative, quantitative, measurement, and design approaches, and my work is frequently interdisciplinary across domains such as feminist and queer theories, international relations, and the law.

From 2017-2022, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Washington and my B.A. from Amherst College. At UW CSE, I had the pleasure to be advised by Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno in the Security and Privacy Research Lab.

Publications

• Privacy Norms of Transformative Fandom: A Case Study of an Activity-Defined Community
  Abigail Marsh and Ada Lerner.
  27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2024), San José, Costa Rica, November 2024
• "Custodian of Online Communities": Investigating Mutual Support among Moderators in Managing Community Safety
  Madiha Tabassum, Alana Mackey and Ada Lerner.
  Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 2024.
• Investigating Moderation Challenges to Combating Hate and Harassment: The Case of Mod-Admin Power Dynamics and Feature Misuse on Reddit
  Madiha Tabassum, Alana Mackey, Ashley Schuett, and Ada Lerner.
  33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2024), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 2024
• SoK: Technical Implementation and Human Impact of Internet Privacy Regulations.
  Eleanor Birrell, Jay Rodolitz, Angel Ding, Emily McReynolds, Jevan Hutson, and Ada Lerner.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2024), San Francisco, California, May 2024
• Counting Carrds: Investigating Personal Disclosure and Boundary Management in Transformative Fandom.
  Kelly Wang, Dan Bially Levy, Kien Nguyen, Ada Lerner, Abby Marsh.
  ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI 2024), Honolulu, Hawai'i, April 2024
• “It’s a Fair Game”, or Is It? Examining How Users Navigate Disclosure Risks and Benefits When Using LLM-Based Conversational Agents.
  Zhiping Zhang, Michelle Jia, Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Bingsheng Yao, Sauvik Das, Ada Lerner, Dakuo Wang, and Tianshi Li
  ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI 2024), Honolulu, Hawai'i, April 2024
• How Well Do My Results Generalize Now? The External Validity of Online Privacy and Security Surveys
  Jenny Tang, Eleanor Birrell, Ada Lerner.
  Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Boston, Massachusetts, August 2022
• Defining Privacy: How Users Interpret Technical Terms in Privacy Policies.
  Jenny Tang, Hannah Shoemaker, Ada Lerner, Eleanor Birrell.
  Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, The Internet, July 2021
• Privacy and Activism in the Transgender Community.
  Ada Lerner, Helen Yuxun He, Anna Kawakami, Silvia Catherine Zeamer, and Roberto Hoyle.
  ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI 2020), Honolulu, Hawai'i, April 2020
• Computer Security and Privacy for Refugees in the United States.
  Lucy Simko, Ada Lerner, Samia Ibtasam, Franziska Roesner, and Tadayoshi Kohno.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2018), San Francisco, May 2018.
• Toward Understanding the Privacy Needs of Marginalized Populations.
  Ada Lerner, Roberto Hoyle.
  "Moving Beyond a 'One-Size Fits All' Approach: Exploring Individual Differences in Privacy" Workshop at CHI 2018, Montreal, Canada, April 2018.
• Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present.
  Ada Lerner, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Franziska Roesner.
  In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '17), Dallas, TX, November 2017.
• Confidante: Usable Encrypted Email - A Case Study With Lawyers and Journalists.
  Ada Lerner, Eric Zeng, and Franziska Roesner.
  2nd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), April 2017.
• Internet Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Trackers: An Archaeological Study of Web Tracking from 1996 to 2016.
  Ada Lerner, Anna Kornfeld Simpson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Franziska Roesner.
  25th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2016.
• Analyzing the Use of Quick Response Codes in the Wild.
  Ada Lerner, Alisha Saxena, Kirk Ouimet, Ben Turley, Anthony Vance, Tadayoshi Kohno, Franziska Roesner.
  13th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), May 2015.
• Cryptographic Currencies from a Tech-Policy Perspective: Policy Issues and Technical Directions.
  Emily McReynolds, Ada Lerner, Will Scott, Franziska Roesner, and Tadayoshi Kohno.
  2nd Workshop on Bitcoin Research, January 2015.
• Control-Alt-Hack: The Design and Evaluation of a Card Game for Computer Security Awareness and Education.
  Tamara Denning, Ada Lerner, Adam Shostack, and Tadayoshi Kohno.
  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '13), 2013.