Leveraging Digital Disentanglement in Romantic Breakups to Improve Access Control for Cybersecure Advanced Manufacturing
‍Caseysimone Ballestas, Bob Tianqi Wei, Subin Lee, Moritz Rietschel, Bjoern Hartmann
IN PROGRESS
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ABSTRACT
This research explores cybersecurity challenges in advanced manufacturing by examining digital disentanglement patterns in romantic breakups. Through analysis of self-disclosed narratives from Reddit posts, Modern Love essays, and industrial postmortems, we identified significant parallels between access control in these seemingly disparate domains. Our findings reveal strong symmetries in rules and norms (100%), active monitoring (66%), and unauthorized access response (20%), while highlighting critical gaps in industrial systems around access revocation and socio-emotional factors. Drawing from these insights, we propose design opportunities including emotionally-aware access management tools, transparent monitoring practices, and automated revocation workflows. This novel cross-domain analysis contributes to the growing body of work on human factors in cybersecurity by demonstrating how relational dynamics from romantic breakups can inform more resilient, human-centered access control systems in industrial environments. The study highlights the importance of considering emotional and social dimensions when designing cybersecurity measures.