Lin Kyi

About Me

Hi! My name is Lin (she/her). I am a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) where I am supervised by Asia Biega in the Responsible Computing Group. I am supported by the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship (in the Privacy, Safety, and Security research area). My papers have received the 2024 Council of Europe Award in Data Protection and a Best Paper Award at the 2025 Annual Privacy Forum. My research has also engaged regulators, industry, trade union, privacy NGOs, and AI ethics stakeholders across Europe and North America.

The goal of my research is to advance responsible data collection practices, centred on consent as a foundation for building ethical technologies. My work sits at the intersection of security and privacy, human-computer interaction, and tech policy. I use qualitative and quantitative HCI research methods, and primarily publish at top-tier computing venues (CHI, USENIX Security) and venues for regulators and policymakers. My research makes the following contributions:

  1. Advance understanding of GDPR consent mechanisms beyond the user interface: examining legal loopholes to consent, and requirements for meaningful and informed consent;
  2. Mitigate emerging challenges to consent: informing responsible data collection practices for GenAI development, and the limits of consent in giving workers agency over their data; and
  3. Propose a collective data governance framework based on insights from 1 and 2, giving people more leverage over their data in a variety of data governance contexts, bridging the gap between consent as a legal obligation (e.g., GDPR), and consent as a principle for building ethical technologies

Education

PhD in Computer Science at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) (Bochum, Germany)
Supervisor: Asia Biega
Thesis topic: Reimagining Online Consent for Responsible, Human-Centric and Sustainable Data Collection
September 2021 - Present

MA in Human-Computer Interaction at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
Thesis: “End User Mental Models of Social Engineering Attacks” PDF
2019 - 2021

BA (Honours) in Psychology at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
2015 - 2019

Relevant Work Experience

Visiting Researcher at University of Oxford (Oxford, UK)
Hosted by the Human-Centred Computing Group, Department of Computer Science
September - December 2023

Pool of Experts, European Data Protection Board (Remote)
2023 - 2024

User Experience Research Intern at the Government of Canada (Ottawa, ON)
May - August 2020

first.last@mpi-sp.org Bluesky LinkedIn Twitter Google Scholar