24,995 research outputs found
Why Do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Password Managers?
People use weak passwords for a variety of reasons, the most prescient of these being memory load and inconvenience. The motivation to choose weak passwords is even more compelling on Smartphones because entering complex passwords is particularly time consuming and arduous on small devices. Many of the memory- and inconvenience-related issues can be ameliorated by using a password manager app. Such an app can generate, remember and automatically supply passwords to websites and other apps on the phone. Given this potential, it is unfortunate that these applications have not enjoyed widespread adoption. We carried out a study to find out why this was so, to investigate factors that impeded or encouraged password manager adoption. We found that a number of factors mediated during all three phases of adoption: searching, deciding and trialling. The study’s findings will help us to market these tools more effectively in order to encourage future adoption of password managers
Android Permissions Remystified: A Field Study on Contextual Integrity
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially
access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how
applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security
decisions too frequently and in benign situations, they may become habituated
and approve all future requests without regard for the consequences. If they
are asked to make too few security decisions, they may become concerned that
the platform is revealing too much sensitive information. To explore this
tradeoff, we instrumented the Android platform to collect data regarding how
often and under what circumstances smartphone applications are accessing
protected resources regulated by permissions. We performed a 36-person field
study to explore the notion of "contextual integrity," that is, how often are
applications accessing protected resources when users are not expecting it?
Based on our collection of 27 million data points and exit interviews with
participants, we examine the situations in which users would like the ability
to deny applications access to protected resources. We found out that at least
80% of our participants would have preferred to prevent at least one permission
request, and overall, they thought that over a third of requests were invasive
and desired a mechanism to block them
The Feasibility of Dynamically Granted Permissions: Aligning Mobile Privacy with User Preferences
Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by
prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that
this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the
circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be
vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests
access. We performed a longitudinal 131-person field study to analyze the
contextuality behind user privacy decisions to regulate access to sensitive
resources. We built a classifier to make privacy decisions on the user's behalf
by detecting when context has changed and, when necessary, inferring privacy
preferences based on the user's past decisions and behavior. Our goal is to
automatically grant appropriate resource requests without further user
intervention, deny inappropriate requests, and only prompt the user when the
system is uncertain of the user's preferences. We show that our approach can
accurately predict users' privacy decisions 96.8% of the time, which is a
four-fold reduction in error rate compared to current systems.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
Smartphone apps usage patterns as a predictor of perceived stress levels at workplace
Explosion of number of smartphone apps and their diversity has created a
fertile ground to study behaviour of smartphone users. Patterns of app usage,
specifically types of apps and their duration are influenced by the state of
the user and this information can be correlated with the self-reported state of
the users. The work in this paper is along the line of understanding patterns
of app usage and investigating relationship of these patterns with the
perceived stress level within the workplace context. Our results show that
using a subject-centric behaviour model we can predict stress levels based on
smartphone app usage. The results we have achieved, of average accuracy of 75%
and precision of 85.7%, can be used as an indicator of overall stress levels in
work environments and in turn inform stress reduction organisational policies,
especially when considering interrelation between stress and productivity of
workers
Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies
The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance
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