Wellington E. Barbosa

Ph.D. Student · Human-Centered Security and Privacy

I am a third-year Ph.D. Student at The George Washington University, where I am advised by Dr. Adam Aviv in the (awesome!) GWUSEC Lab.

I use mixed-methods research, including large-scale measurements, interviews, user studies, and surveys, to understand how emerging technologies can become misaligned with users' interests and introduce unforeseen security and privacy risks.

Most of my work have focused on understanding researchers' security and privacy needs, aiming to design open-source tools and artifacts to support security, privacy, and alignment research. Recently, I have also become interested in the alignment, security, and privacy of agentic systems.

If you are working on similar topics or are interested in collaborating, feel free to reach out or connect with me on LinkedIn!

Ongoing Projects

Qualitative · Stage: Study design

Anti-Fraud Survey App

I'm developing an open-source survey application that supports secure online data collection, with integrated anti-fraud features.

Quantitative · Stage: Data analysis

Consent Decisions Alignment

I'm investigating how users' privacy preferences align with historical cookie consent decisions by combining consent data, browsing behavior, and survey responses.

Qualitative · Stage: Qualitative coding

Ethics in Human-AI Interaction

I'm supporting a systematic review of human-AI interaction studies to synthesize reported uses of LLMs, deployment practices, ethical risks, and safeguards.

Publications

PETS 2027

An Exploratory User Study of Disclosure Avoidance Tools for Scientific Microdata

Wentao Guo, Wellington Esposito Barbosa, Adam J. Aviv, Michelle L. Mazurek

SOUPS 2026

SoK: Mapping Threats to Defenses in Online Survey Fraud

Shiza Ali, Wellington Esposito Barbosa, Matthias Fassl, Aditi Ganapathi, Jaron Mink, Adam J. Aviv

Paper

IMC 2025

Mirror Mirror on the Wall, which APK Mirror Site is the Largest of Them All?

Neal Keating, Wellington Esposito Barbosa, Leo Phan, Viraj Prakash, Gianluca Stringhini, Adam J. Aviv

Paper

Updates

August 2026 I've had a great time at SOUPS '26 in Hannover, Germany presenting our paper 'SoK: Mapping Threats to Defenses in Online Survey Fraud'.
August 2026 I've attended USENIX Security '26 in Baltimore, MD and presented a poster on how users' privacy preferences are (mis)aligned with their cookies consent settings.
October 2025 I went to Madison, WI to attend IMC '25 and copresent our measurement paper on third-party Android app stores.
July 2025 I attended (and volunteered at) PETS '25 in Washington, DC.
August 2024 I moved from Brazil to Washington, DC to start my Ph.D. in Computer Science at GWU!