Moving Beyond Clicks: Rethinking Consent and User Control in the Age of AI

CHI 2026 Workshop

Our everyday digital lives are saturated with challenging privacy decisions, many of which are stacked against us through the use of e.g., manipulative design. Emerging work on interfaces such as voice and V/X/AR show similar problems emerging. While it is clear that the notice and consent mechanism for privacy decisions is broken, its adoption as the cornerstone of data protection and other regulations means that we need to envision and design human-centric solutions that address the continuing problems related to consent and control.

The workshop will bring together experts from AI, HCI, design, privacy, social sciences, policy, and law to further analyse these problems and work together on solutions. Through two design sessions, we will co-create a set of future personas and design provocations that take us beyond the limits of conventional consent and control mechanisms.

Prospective participants should submit a 3-page position paper outlining an innovative approach to or perspective on one of the workshop's key questions to the workshop website. As mentioned earlier, accepted papers will be clustered by the organizers based on the topic ahead of the workshop, will be presented by the participants at the workshop and will be published afterwards. Participants can expect to work on issues of consent and control by co-designing tangible prototypes (prototypes that provoke) as innovative and critical solutions, and network with other scholars and practitioners from neighbouring fields.