The effects of the media equation on children

Computers play an increasingly large part in children’s daily lives, yet most interface design research has focused on adult users. One area of research that has informed adult interface design is the Media Equation, which explains how people respond to media in a fundamentally social manner and how they treat computers as social actors in interactions. To date, it was unknown whether these findings apply to children as well. This thesis investigates the effects of the Media Equation on children in three specific areas: praise, team formation, and politeness. It also examines whether varying the form of the computer affects the Media Equation in any way and whether there are any gender differences in how children respond to the Media Equation. Little evidence was found to support the existence of Media Equation effects on children. Children responded positively regardless of whether any Media Equation elements were incorporated into the interfaces. These results raise doubts on whether there is any added value to including Media Equation principles into the design of children’s interfaces. The results do, however, shed some light on children-computer interaction and lead to a set of guidelines for designers of children’s technology

"Sign in with ... Privacy'': Timely Disclosure of Privacy Differences among Web SSO Login Options

The number of login options on web sites has increased since the introduction of web single sign-on (SSO) protocols. Web SSO services allow users to grant web sites or relying parties (RPs) access to their personal profile information from identity provider (IdP) accounts. Many RP sites do not provide sufficient privacy information that could help users make informed login decisions. Moreover, privacy differences in permission requests across login options are largely hidden from users and are time-consuming to manually extract and compare. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of popular RP implementations supporting three major IdP login options (Facebook, Google, and Apple) and categorize RPs in the top 500 sites into four client-side code patterns. Informed by these RP patterns, we design and implement SSOPrivateEye (SPEye), a browser extension prototype that extracts and displays to users permission request information from SSO login options in RPs covering the three IdPs

Influences of Displaying Permission-related Information on Web Single Sign-On Login Decisions

Web users are increasingly presented with multiple login options, including password-based login and common web single sign-on (SSO) login options such as "Login with Google" and "Login with Facebook". There has been little focus in previous studies on how users choose from a list of login options and how to better inform users about privacy issues in web SSO systems. In this paper, we conducted a 200-participant study to understand factors that influence participants' login decisions, and how they are affected by displaying permission differences across login options; permissions in SSO result in release of user personal information to third-party web sites through SSO identity providers. We compare and report on login decisions made by participants before and after viewing permission-related information, examine self-reported responses for reasons related to their login decisions, and report on the factors that motivated their choices. We find that usability preferences and inertia causes (habituation) were among the dominant factors influencing login decisions. After participants viewed permission-related information, many prioritised privacy over other factors, changing their login decisions to more privacy-friendly alternatives. Displaying permission-related information also influenced some participants to make tradeoffs between privacy and usability preferences

Teaching with an Interactive E-book to Improve Children's Online Privacy Knowledge

© {Zhang-Kennedy, Chiasson, | ACM} {2016}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in { Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children},https://doi.org/10.1145/2930674.2935984 .We designed the Cyberheroes interactive e-book and conducted a preliminary user study to test its effectiveness in educating children aged 7 to 9 about online privacy risks. Children and parents found the book to be fun and engaging. Our study included pre and post interviews and knowledge assessment. It showed that the interactive e-book successfully improved children's understanding of privacy risks while exhibiting excellent retention in knowledge after one week

A Systematic Review of Multimedia Tools for Cybersecurity Awareness and Education

© {Leah Zhang-Kennedy, Sonia Chiasson ​| ACM} {2021}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in {ACM Computing Surveys}, https://doi.org/10.1145/3427920.We conduct a comprehensive review covering academic publications and industry products relating to tools for cybersecurity awareness and education aimed at non-expert end-users developed in the past 20 years. Through our search criteria, we identified 119 tools that we cataloged into five broad media categories. We explore current trends, assess their use of relevant instructional design principles, and review empirical evi dence of the tools’ effectiveness. From our review, we provide an evaluation checklist and suggest that a more systematic approach to the design and evaluation of cybersecurity educational tools would be beneficial