Investigating loan applicants' perceptions of alternative data items and the effect of incentives on disclosure

Lenders use information about loan applicants to predict whether a person is a good or bad credit risk; however borrowers express reservations about disclosing their personal information. In this paper we describe the design of a study in which we try to identify which data items have bigger privacy costs for individuals and whether it is possible to adjust lenders' data collection procedures in order to improve the privacy of the borrowers while maintaining or improving the accuracy of risk assessment methods. We aim to explore whether consumers could be equitably encouraged to give different information than they do presently, by offering incentives for disclosures. These incentives are: an uncertain long term financial gain; a certain short term financial gain. We also explore an inequitable manipulation using peer pressure. The advantages and disadvantages of this methodological approach are also discussed

Students' Experiences of Interdisciplinary Learning while Building Scientific Video Games

Game jams, hackathons and similar group game creation events have become increasingly popular over the past decade (Fowler et al., 2015). They provide new and exciting opportunities for education and research. They foster creative thinking and innovation (Preston et al., 2012), and strengthen project management and communication skills (Smith & Bowers, 2016); all of which are essential skills for working in industry (Pirker et al., 2016)

Factors that promote or inhibit the implementation of e-health systems: an explanatory systematic review

OBJECTIVE: To systematically review the literature on the implementation of e-health to identify: (i) barriers and facilitators to e-health implementation, and (ii) outstanding gaps in research on the subject.METHODS: MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PSYCINFO and the Cochrane Library were searched for reviews published between 1 January 1995 and 17 March 2009. Studies had to be systematic reviews, narrative reviews, qualitative metasyntheses or meta-ethnographies of e-health implementation. Abstracts and papers were double screened and data were extracted on country of origin; e-health domain; publication date; aims and methods; databases searched; inclusion and exclusion criteria and number of papers included. Data were analysed qualitatively using normalization process theory as an explanatory coding framework.FINDINGS: Inclusion criteria were met by 37 papers; 20 had been published between 1995 and 2007 and 17 between 2008 and 2009. Methodological quality was poor: 19 papers did not specify the inclusion and exclusion criteria and 13 did not indicate the precise number of articles screened. The use of normalization process theory as a conceptual framework revealed that relatively little attention was paid to: (i) work directed at making sense of e-health systems, specifying their purposes and benefits, establishing their value to users and planning their implementation; (ii) factors promoting or inhibiting engagement and participation; (iii) effects on roles and responsibilities; (iv) risk management, and (v) ways in which implementation processes might be reconfigured by user-produced knowledge.CONCLUSION: The published literature focused on organizational issues, neglecting the wider social framework that must be considered when introducing new technologies.<br/

Federated identity to access e-government services - are citizens ready for this?

Both the US & UK government have decided that citizens will to authenticate to government using Federated Identity (FedID) solutions: governments do not want to be Identity providers (IdPs), but leverage accounts that citizens have with other service providers instead. We investigated how citizens react to their first encounter FedID authentication in this context. We performed 2 studies using low fidelity prototypes with: in study 1, 44 citizen participants, & in study 2, 22 small business owners, employees & agents. We recorded their reactions during their user journey authenticating with 3rd party providers they already had accounts with. In study 1, 50% of participants said they would not continue to use the system on reaching the hub page, & 45% believed they were being asked to make a payment. 25% of those continuing said they would stop when they reached the consent page, where they were asked by their IdP to authorise the release of their identifying information to the government service. 34% of the participants felt threatened rather than reassured by the privacy protection statement. With study 2's improved prototype, only 14% of participants said they would not continue on reaching the hub page, & 6% abandoned at the consent page. Our results show that usability & acceptance of FedID can be greatly improved by the application of standard HCI techniques, but trust in the ID Provider is essential. We finally report results from a survey of which ID providers UK citizens would trust, & found significant differences between age groups. © 2013 ACM

Adding insult to injury: consumer experiences of being denied credit

To inspire confidence in consumer credit and improve outcomes for consumers, negative experiences such as being denied credit must be handled appropriately. We conducted an online survey with 298 UK citizens who had a credit application denied to gain a better understanding of their experience of being denied credit. We found that privacy issues make this experience more upsetting for consumers than necessary. When being denied credit, respondents are most concerned about (1) being denied credit ‘in public’; and (2) not being informed about the reasons why they are denied. Only 23% of our respondents knew why they had been denied; 116 (62%) believed they had been denied credit because of their credit record, but 28% had never checked it. Out of the 194 respondents who had checked their record, 38 identified errors in their credit reports, and in 14 of these cases (38%) debts that they had paid off were incorrectly listed as outstanding. Based on our findings, we propose several changes to the credit application process: (1) providing sensitive but helpful information in a private manner, e.g. a preview of their credit score before they commit a loan application; (2) credit denial notifications with information on what to do next; and (3) giving applicants more information about checking their credit report and who to contact for correcting errors

Too close for comfort: A study of the effectiveness and acceptability of rich-media personalized advertising

Online display advertising is predicted to make $29.53 billion this year. Advertisers believe targeted and personalized ads to be more effective, but many users are concerned about their privacy. We conducted a study where 30 participants completed a simulated holiday booking task; each page showing ads with different degrees of personalization. Participants fixated twice as long when ads contained their photo. Participants reported being more likely to notice ads with their photo, holiday destination, and name, but also increasing levels of discomfort with increasing personalization. We conclude that greater personalization in ad content may achieve higher levels of attention, but that the most personalized ads are also the least acceptable. The noticeability benefit in using someone‟s photo to make them look at an ad may be offset by the privacy cost. As more personal data becomes available to advertisers, it becomes important that these trade-offs are considered

Would You Sell Your Mother's Data? Personal Data Disclosure in a Simulated Credit Card Application.

To assess the risk of a loan applicant defaulting, lenders feed applicants‟ data into credit scoring algorithms. They are always looking to improve the effectiveness of their predictions, which means improving the algorithms and/or collecting different data. Research on financial behavior found that elements of a person‟s family history and social ties can be good predictors of financial responsibility and control. Our study investigated how loan applicants applying for a credit card would respond to questions such as “Did any of your loved ones die while you were growing up?” 48 participants were asked to complete a new type of credit card application form containing such requests as part of a “Consumer Acceptance Test” of a credit card with lower interest rates, but only available to “financially responsible customers.” This was a double-blind study – the experimenters processing participants were told exactly the same. We found that: (1) more sensitive items are disclosed less often - e.g. friends‟ names and contact had only a 69% answer rate; (2) privacy fundamentalists are 5.6 times less likely to disclose data; and (3) providing a justification for a question has no effect on its answer rate. Discrepancies between acceptability and disclosure were observed – e.g. 43% provided names and contact of friends, having said they found the question unacceptable. We conclude that collecting data items not traditionally seen as relevant could be made acceptable if lenders can credibly establish relevance, and assure applicants they will be assessed fairly. More research needs to be done on how to best communicate these qualities

Attitudes Towards End-of-Life Decisions and the Subjective Concepts of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis

Background: People have fought for their civil rights, primarily the right to live in dignity. At present, the development of technology in medicine and healthcare led to an apparent paradox: many people are fighting for the right to die. This study was aimed at testing whether different moral principles are associated with different attitudes towards end-of-life decisions for patients with a severe brain damage. Methodology: We focused on the ethical decisions about withdrawing life-sustaining treatments in patients with severe brain damage. 202 undergraduate students at the University of Padova were given one description drawn from four profiles describing different pathological states: the permanent vegetative state, the minimally conscious state, the locked-in syndrome, and the terminal illness. Participants were asked to evaluate how dead or how alive the patient was, and how appropriate it was to satisfy the patient's desire. Principal Findings: We found that the moral principles in which people believe affect not only people's judgments concerning the appropriateness of the withdrawal of life support, but also the perception of the death status of patients with severe brain injury. In particular, we found that the supporters of the Free Choice (FC) principle perceived the death status of the patients with different pathologies differently: the more people believe in the FC, the more they perceived patients as dead in pathologies where conscious awareness is severely impaired. By contrast, participants who agree with the Sanctity of Life (SL) principle did not show differences across pathologies. Conclusions: These results may shed light on the complex aspects of moral consensus for supporting or rejecting end-of-life decisions