Cyber security fear appeals:unexpectedly complicated

Cyber security researchers are starting to experiment with fear appeals, with a wide variety of designs and reported efficaciousness. This makes it hard to derive recommendations for designing and deploying these interventions. We thus reviewed the wider fear appeal literature to arrive at a set of guidelines to assist cyber security researchers. Our review revealed a degree of dissent about whether or not fear appeals are indeed helpful and advisable. Our review also revealed a wide range of fear appeal experimental designs, in both cyber and other domains, which confirms the need for some standardized guidelines to inform practice in this respect. We propose a protocol for carrying out fear appeal experiments, and we review a sample of cyber security fear appeal studies, via this lens, to provide a snapshot of the current state of play. We hope the proposed experimental protocol will prove helpful to those who wish to engage in future cyber security fear appeal research

Smart Home Speakers and Family Information Disclosure Decisions

Smart Home Speakers (SHSs) are becoming a part of family lives. Parents use them to engage children and to simplify their own everyday demanding schedules. For SHSs to provide the intended benefits, data are collected and can be shared with the device’s provider. Families, thus, must make decisions about the device’s privacy settings and usage in the home, and these information disclosure decisions affect the whole family. Drawing on multilevel information privacy and family technology usage research, this study seeks to understand how family members reconcile their individual information privacy views over time when using a shared technology. We conducted a longitudinal grounded theory study with 12 families consisting of three sets of interviews. We developed a model of how families decide about usage of and disclosure of information to shared technologies like a SHS, which can guide future research on information disclosure decisions for shared technologies in collective units