COSH 2024 : International Workshop on Child Online Safety and Harms

Workshop Description:
The opportunities that online services and communication provide to children (i.e., individuals under 18 years of age) are endless – e.g., for socialisation, entertainment and education. However, the potential for harm affecting their safety, wellbeing, privacy and security are proportionally high. This workshop invites studies from different disciplines and perspectives to better understand problems and trade-offs, propose new age-appropriate solutions, mitigate harms, evaluate existing approaches, and discuss practical or research challenges. We welcome novel contributions in the format of position papers, research papers, and empirical papers (e.g., case studies) involving stakeholders such as researchers, industry practitioners, policy makers, safeguarding professionals, and NGO advocates.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Characteristics of children’s usage of online services/platforms according to age range
• Age-appropriate design and auditing
• Assessment of risks and harms posed to children online
• Trade-offs between different goals, e.g., privacy vs. safety, risks vs. children rights
• Age estimation, recognising child users, and discriminating children of different age range
• Children’s data privacy and protection
• Evaluation of existing mitigations and solutions to protect children online
• Education of children about cyber security and online safety
• Pedagogy and empirical evaluation of practices for cyber security education of children
• Challenges of research involving children
• Regulations and jurisdictional issues related to protection of children online

Workshop Chairs

Virginia N. L. Franqueira
University of Kent, UK

Tatiana Ringenberg
Purdue University, US

Jayati Dev
Comcast Cyber Security Research, US

Brian N. Levine
University of Massachusetts Amherst, US

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
The submission guidelines can be found at https://www.ares-conference.eu/conference/submission/ (6-8 pages, a maximum of 10 pages is tolerated). Double blind review: All papers submitted to EasyChair should be anonymized (no names or affiliations of authors should be visible in the paper) with no obvious self-references. Submission of a paper implies that should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and present the paper in the workshop. Proceedings will be published by ACM.