Design(ing) Fictions for Collective Civic Reporting of Privacy Harms

Individually-experienced privacy harms are often difficult to demonstrate and quantify, which impedes efforts for their redress. Their effects often appear small and are inconsistently documented, and they only become more obvious when aggregated over time and across populations. Taking a design fiction approach, we explore the design requirements and cultural ideals of a government-run system that empowers people to collectively report on and make sense of experiences of privacy harm from online behavioral advertising. Through the use of fictional inquiry, story completion, and comicboarding methods, delivered in an online survey with 50 participants, we found that participants had detailed conceptions of the user experience of such a tool, but wanted assurance that their labor and personal data would not be exploited further by the government if they contributed evidence of harm. We extrapolate these design insights to government-supported complaint-reporting platforms in other domains, finding multiple common design gaps that might disincentivize people to report experiences of harm, be they privacy-related or otherwise.