Crowdsourcing Privacy Design Critique: An Empirical Evaluation of Framing Effects

When designed incorrectly, information systems can thwart people’s expectations of privacy. An emerging technique for evaluating systems during the development stage is the crowdsourcing design critique, in which design evaluations are sourced using crowdsourcing platforms. However, we know that information framing has a serious effect on decision-making and can steer design critiques in one way or another. We investigate how the framing of design cases can influence the outcomes of privacy design critiques. Specifically, we test whether -˜Personas’, a central User-Centered Design tool for describing users, can inspire empathy in users while criticizing privacy designs. In an experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (n=456), we show that describing design cases by using personas causes intrusive designs to be criticized more harshly. We discuss how our results can be used to enhance privacy-by-design processes and encourage user-centered privacy engineering

Understanding the Valuation of Location Privacy: a Crowdsourcing-Based Approach

The exchange of private information for services or other benefits is a commonplace practice today in the advent of mobile technology. In the case of mobile services, the exchanged commodity is increasingly often spatial location of the user. To decide whether this transaction is beneficial, the user needs to evaluate the exchange value of this commodity. To assess the value users give to their location, and to understand its relationship with location sharing, we conducted a study on a mobile crowdsourcing platform (N=190). We find that users\u27 valuation of location privacy is dependent on the sharing scenario. For instance, when the location is to be shared with an untrusted advertiser, the users require a premium as compensation for their information. Additionally, benefit perception and trust are found to be connected with more frequent location sharing, while perceived risks and privacy concern are associated with sharing one’s location less frequently

Retrospective Privacy: Managing Longitudinal Privacy in Online Social Networks

Online social networks provide access to the user’s information for long periods of time after the information’s initial publication. In this paper, we investigate the relation between information aging and its sharing preferences on Facebook. Our findings are based on a survey of 193 Facebook users, in which we asked users to specify their sharing preferences and intentions towards posts that were published in different periods of time (from the time of the survey and up to 24 months prior to the time of the survey.) Our results show that willingness to share significantly drops with the time passed since publishing the post. The occurrence of life changes, such as graduating from college or moving to a new town, is correlated with a further decrease in the willingness to share. We discuss our findings by relating it to information aging theories and privacy theories. Finally, we use our results to reflect on privacy mechanisms for long-term usage of online social networks, such as expiry date for content and historical information reviewing processes