Arthur Borem
Hi! I’m a final-year Computer Science PhD at UChicago researching
privacy, advised by
Blase Ur. I've spent my time
here designing, building, and evaluating consumer-facing privacy
systems. Most recently, I worked with the
Data Transfer Initiative
to build and publish a library for executing data
transfer/portability requests (check out
Pardner).
I'm also a full-stack software engineer and have worked at Asana, Lyft, and Bank of America.
| I'm graduating with my PhD in June of 2026 and am looking to go back to industry, but am open-minded about what role I'd be taking on! Having said that, I'm interested in privacy engineering, product-focused software engineering, and research roles. If my research and experience sound like they could be a good fit, I'd be happy to chat. Send me an email! |
Publications
Characterizing the Usability and Usefulness of U.S. Ad Transparency Systems
Kevin Bryson, Arthur Borem, Phoebe Moh, Omer Akgul,
Laura Edelson, Tobias Lauinger, Michelle L. Mazurek, Damon McCoy,
Blase Ur
IEEE S&P 2025
Data Subjects’ Reactions to Exercising Their Right of Access
Arthur Borem, Elleen Pan, Olufunmilola Obielodan,
Aurelie Roubinowitz, Luca Dovichi, Michelle L Mazurek, Blase Ur
USENIX Security Symposium 2024
Evaluation of Ad Transparency Systems
Kevin Bryson, Arthur Borem, Phoebe Moh, Omer Akgul,
Laura Edelson, Chriss Geeng, Tobias Lauinger, Michelle L. Mazurek,
Damon McCoy, Blase Ur
IEEE ConPro 2024
JupyterLab in Retrograde: Contextual Notifications That Highlight Fairness and Bias Issues for Data Scientists
Galen Harrison, Kevin Bryson, Ahmad Emmanuel Balla Bamba, Luca
Dovichi, Aleksander Herrmann Binion, Arthur Borem,
Blase Ur
ACM CHI 2024, 🏆 Best Paper Award
Defining “Broken”: User Experiences and Remediation Tactics When Ad-Blocking or Tracking-Protection Tools Break a Website’s User Experience
Alexandra Nisenoff, Arthur Borem, Madison Pickering,
Grant Nakanishi, Maya Thumpasery, Blase Ur
USENIX Security Symposium 2023
Privacy & Contextual Integrity in a Crowdsourced Gig Work Knowledge Sharing Platform
Arthur Borem and Elleen Pan
5th Annual Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity
(PrivaCI 2023)
Self-E: Smartphone-Supported Guidance for Customizable Self-Experimentation
Nediyana Daskalova, Eindra Kyi, Kevin Ouyang,
Arthur Borem, Sally Chen, Nicole Nugent, Jeff Huang
ACM CHI 2021
Developing and Supporting STEM Undergraduate Teaching Assistants as Partners in Teaching
Arthur Borem, Christina Smith
IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) 2020
Talks
Designing a Data Subject Access Rights Tool
USENIX PEPR 2024
Data Subjects’ Reactions to Exercising Their Right of Access
USENIX Security Symposium 2024
(Some) Research Projects
| Check out my resume for an up-to-date list! |
Visualizer for Data Subject Access Requests
I’m building a web tool for consumers who wish to explore and aggregate their personal data from making a Data Subject Access or Portability Request. It runs fully on the client-side and is platform agnostic.
User study on enacting Data Subject Rights
After developing a data annotation web-app, I ran a user study with online consumers from around the world. They explored their data using the tool I built and noted things they found surprising or creepy. They were often overwhelmed and confused, but felt more trust toward the platforms the more transparency they were given. Watch my talk or read the full paper if you want to learn more!
Ad transparency systems taxonomy and evaluation
Analyzed 22 online ad transparency platforms (e.g., Google’s My Ad Center) and built a taxonomy listing every feature and affordance and which platforms implemented them. Then ran a user study where we asked around 200 participants to try to find specific settings and asked them about the process. Many of them were dissatisfied and found the existing systems overly complex, but also lacking key details. Read the full paper!
Fixing websites broken by ad-blockers and tracking protection browser extensions and tools
Built taxonomy for ways privacy extensions break websites by analyzing thousands of browser extension marketplace reviews for a dozen privacy extensions. After running a user study, identified the top ways users react when this happened to them. Based on this info, we are working on a solution that detects breakage by analyzing downstream effects of fetching and blocking specific resources. Read the paper on the taxonomy for more details!
Bio
I was born and raised in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and moved to the U.S. during my junior year of high school! I then went to Brown University where I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. While there, I was involved in research projects with Seny Kamara (applied cryptography), Phil Klein (fair census redistricting), and Christina Smith (pedagogy in higher education). I also did software engineering internships at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Lyft.
After Brown, I was a full-stack software engineer at Asana. There I revamped the Do Not Disturb feature, launched Messaging, maintained email infrastructure, and built the transcription generation pipeline for Video Messages, which won us a Fast Company award!
Then I moved to Chicago to start my PhD.
In addition to working on online data privacy and data access/portability, I’m a huge fan of movies, learning languages (Spanish, Italian, and, most recently, Chinese!), crocheting, and running.