Arthur Borem
Hi! I’m a software engineer and researcher designing, building, and evaluating
consumer-facing privacy systems. I have a PhD in Computer Science from
UChicago, where I was advised by Blase Ur.
In my dissertation, I presented an evaluation of and proposed several tools
for improving the usability and utility of data subject rights.
Last summer, I worked with the
Data Transfer Initiative
to build and publish a library for executing data
transfer/portability requests (check out
Pardner).
Before my PhD, I spent my time as a software engineer at Asana, Lyft, and Bank of America.
| After I finish my PhD in June 2026, I’ll be joining the Computational Policy Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School as a software engineer! |
Work
Graduate Researcher @ UChicago SUPERgroup
09/2021 – 06/2026
Software Engineer Intern @ Data Transfer Initiative
07/2025 – 09/2025
Software Engineer @ Asana
06/2020 – 09/2021
Software Engineer Intern @ Lyft
06/2019 – 08/2019
Software Engineer Intern @ Bank of America
06/2018 – 08/2018
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
Dismantling the Barriers to Personal Data Portability (slides)
USENIX PEPR '26
How Consumers React When Exercising Their Right of Access
French Data Protection Authority (CNIL, Research@LINC) 2026
Designing a Data Subject Access Rights Tool
USENIX PEPR '24
Data Subjects’ Reactions to Exercising Their Right of Access
USENIX Security Symposium 2024
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.