Nudging folks towards stronger password choices:providing certainty is the key

Persuading people to choose strong passwords is challenging. One way to influence password strength, as and when people are making the choice, is to tweak the choice architecture to encourage stronger choice. A variety of choice architecture manipulations i.e. “nudges”, have been trialled by researchers with a view to strengthening the overall password profile. None has made much of a difference so far. Here we report on our design of an influential behavioural intervention tailored to the password choice context: a hybrid nudge that significantly prompted stronger passwords.We carried out three longitudinal studies to analyse the efficacy of a range of “nudges” by manipulating the password choice architecture of an actual university web application. The first and second studies tested the efficacy of several simple visual framing “nudges”. Password strength did not budge. The third study tested expiration dates directly linked to password strength. This manipulation delivered a positive result: significantly longer and stronger passwords. Our main conclusion was that the final successful nudge provided participants with absolute certainty as to the benefit of a stronger password, and that it was this certainty that made the difference

Why do people use unsecure public Wi-Fi? An investigation of behaviour and factors driving decisions

© 2016 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Public Wi-Fi networks are now widely available in many countries. Though undoubtedly convenient, such networks have potential security and privacy risks. The aim of this study was to understand if people are aware of those risks, and - if so - why they decide to take them. We set up an experimental free Wi-Fi network at 14 locations in central London, UK, for a period of 150 hours, and people connected most often to use instant messaging, search engines, and social networks, and sensitive data (such as name, date of birth, and sexual orientation) were transmitted. We subsequently investigated people's risk awareness and risk behaviour through semi-structured interviews with 14 participants, and an online scenario-based survey with 102 participants. The majority of participants said they would use public Wi-Fi under circumstances where the risks taken are not consistent with maximising utility. Female participants rated the risks associated with public Wi-Fi use, more highly - and yet more females than males said they would use them to save their data plans. These findings align with insights from behavioural economics, specifically the insight that people can misjudge risky situations and do not make decisions consistent with expected utility theory

A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services

Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess users’ preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoples’ willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users

An experimental investigation of intrinsic motivations for giving

This paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying the two intrinsic motivations for giving: warm glow and pure altruism. In particular, we implemented a within-subject experimental design with three treatments: (i) one, where the recipient is the experimenters, which measures altruistic feelings towards the experimenters (T1), (ii) the Crumpler and Grossman (2008) design in which the recipient is a charity, and the dictator's donation crowds out one-for-one a donation by the experimenters, which aims at measuring warm glow giving (T2), (iii) a third one, with a charity recipient and no crowding out, which elicits both types of altruism (T3). We use T1 to assess to what extent altruistic feelings towards the experimenters are a potential confound for measuring warm glow in T2. We find giving in T1 not to be significantly different from T2, suggesting that the Crumpler and Grossman test is an upper bound estimate of warm glow giving. We provide a lower bound estimate based on the behavior of subjects whose estimate of warm glow giving in T2 is not confounded, that is, those who do not display altruistic feelings towards the experimenters in T1. We use these two estimates to decompose giving in T3 into warm glow and pure altruism and find them to be almost equally important. We also propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one employed here, warm glow benefits accumulate and may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not

A Healthy Amount of Privacy: Quantifying Privacy Concerns in Medicine

With recent developments in e-health, concerns have been raised regarding the privacy of patients who are monitored with such treatments. I propose a simple method to incorporate these concerns into a standard health impact evaluation, based on quality-adjusted life years and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. This method provides a way to objectively value privacy concerns and balance them with health benefits. Hence, it can guide doctors and policymakers into incorporating privacy considerations and making better choices regarding e-health programs. This method can also be tested on existing economic evaluations to compare outcomes and gauge the extent to which privacy issues in medical treatments should be taken seriously

An Experimental Investigation of Intrinsic Motivations for Giving

This paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying the two intrinsic motivations for giving: warm glow and pure altruism. In particular, we implemented a within-subject experimental design with three treatments: (i) one, T1, where the recipient is the experimenters, which measures altruistic feelings towards the experimenters, (ii) the Crumpler and Grossman (2008) design, T2, in which the recipient is a charity, and the dictator’s donation crowds out one-for-one a donation by the experimenters, which aims at measuring warm glow giving, (iii) a third one, T3, with a charity recipient and no crowding out, which elicits both types of altruism. We use T1 to assess to what extent altruistic feelings towards the experimenters are a potential confound for measuring warm glow in T2. We find giving in T1 not to be significantly different from T2, suggesting that the Crumpler and Grossman design provides an upper bound estimate of warm glow giving. We provide a lower bound estimate based on the behavior of subjects whose warm glow giving in T2 is not confounded, that is, those who do not display altruistic feelings towards the experimenters in T1. We use these two estimates to quantify the portion of giving in T3 due to pure altruism and find it to be between 20% and 26% of endowment. We also propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one we employ, warm glow accumulates and this may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not.dictator game, warm glow, pure altruism, charitable giving, random lottery, incentive scheme

A Healthy Amount of Privacy: Quantifying Privacy Concerns in Medicine

With recent developments in e-health, concerns have been raised regarding the privacy of patients who are monitored with such treatments. I propose a simple method to incorporate these concerns into a standard health impact evaluation, based on quality-adjusted life years and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. This method provides a way to objectively value privacy concerns and balance them with health benefits. Hence, it can guide doctors and policymakers into incorporating privacy considerations and making better choices regarding e-health programs. This method can also be tested on existing economic evaluations to compare outcomes and gauge the extent to which privacy issues in medical treatments should be taken seriously