Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem

Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google Play stores. We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and the distribution of trackers is long-tailed with several highly dominant trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage. The extent of tracking also differs between categories of apps; in particular, news apps and apps targeted at children appear to be amongst the worst in terms of the number of third party trackers associated with them. Third party tracking is also revealed to be a highly trans-national phenomenon, with many trackers operating in jurisdictions outside the EU. Based on these findings, we draw out some significant legal compliance challenges facing the tracking industry.Comment: Corrected missing company info (Linkedin owned by Microsoft). Figures for Microsoft and Linkedin re-calculated and added to Table

Further Exploring Communal Technology Use in Smart Homes: Social Expectations

Device use in smart homes is becoming increasingly communal, requiring cohabitants to navigate a complex social and technological context. In this paper, we report findings from an exploratory survey grounded in our prior work on communal technology use in the home [4]. The findings highlight the importance of considering qualities of social relationships and technology in understanding expectations and intentions of communal technology use. We propose a design perspective of social expectations, and we suggest existing designs can be expanded using already available information such as location, and considering additional information, such as levels of trust and reliability.Comment: to appear in CHI '20 Extended Abstracts, April 25--30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, US

Self-Control in Cyberspace: Applying Dual Systems Theory to a Review of Digital Self-Control Tools

Many people struggle to control their use of digital devices. However, our understanding of the design mechanisms that support user self-control remains limited. In this paper, we make two contributions to HCI research in this space: first, we analyse 367 apps and browser extensions from the Google Play, Chrome Web, and Apple App stores to identify common core design features and intervention strategies afforded by current tools for digital self-control. Second, we adapt and apply an integrative dual systems model of self-regulation as a framework for organising and evaluating the design features found. Our analysis aims to help the design of better tools in two ways: (i) by identifying how, through a well-established model of self-regulation, current tools overlap and differ in how they support self-control; and (ii) by using the model to reveal underexplored cognitive mechanisms that could aid the design of new tools.Comment: 11.5 pages (excl. references), 6 figures, 1 tabl

Hearing in color: How expectations distort perception of skin tone

Previous research has found that the perceived brightness of a face can be distorted by the social category of race. Thus, Levin and Banaji (2006) found, in a U.S. sample, that faces of identical brightness were perceived to be lighter if they had stereotypical White American features than if they had Black American features. Here, we present 2 experiments conducted in Natal, Brazil, that extend this line of research. Experiment 1 tested if the brightness distortion effect would generalize to a Brazilian population. Experiment 2 tested if speech accent would have a similar effect on brightness perception. In Experiment 1, we found that the brightness distortion effect clearly replicated in the Brazilian sample: Faces with Black racial features were perceived to be darker than faces with White racial features, even though their objective brightness was identical. In Experiment 2, we found that speech accent influenced brightness perception in a similar manner: Faces were perceived to be darker when paired with an accent associated with low socioeconomic status than when they were paired with an accent associated with high socioeconomic status. Whereas racial concepts in Brazil are often claimed to be much more fluid compared with the United States, our findings suggest that the populations are quite similar with respect to associations between facial features and skin tone. Our findings also demonstrate speech accent as an additional source of category information that perceptual cognition can take into account when modeling the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

The Goldilocks level of support:Using user reviews, ratings, and installation numbers to investigate digital self-control tools

Much effort has been invested in designing digital systems that keep people ‘hooked’. By contrast, comparatively little is known about how designers can support people in re-gaining control. Online, however, hundreds of apps and browser extensions promise to help people self-regulate use of digital devices. Reviews and popularity metrics for these digital self-control tools (DSCTs) can indicate which design patterns are useful in the wild. Moreover, they reveal how platforms like Android and iOS differ in the ecosystems they enable for DSCTs, which has important implications for end users. We analysed reviews, installation numbers, and ratings for 334 DSCTs on the Google Play, Chrome Web, and Apple App stores, investigating what user reviews reveal about usage contexts and key design challenges, and how functionality relates to popularity metrics. Our thematic analysis of 1,529 reviews (sampled from a data set of 53,978 distinct reviews scraped in March 2019) found that DSCTs are seen as highly important for focusing on less instantly rewarding tasks when digital distractions are easily available. Users seek DSCTs that adapt to their personal definitions of distraction, and provide support that is sufficient to change behaviour without feeling too coercive. Reviewers suggested combining design patterns to provide a level of support that is ‘just right’. This was mirrored in the ratings, where tools combined different types of design patterns (e.g., website blocking and goal reminders) tended to receive higher ratings than those implementing a single type. We discuss implications for research and design, including how design patterns in DSCTs interact, and how psychological reactance to DSCTs can be reduced