Rashidi, Yasmeen

Vaniea, Kami

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) applications (apps) such as WhatsApp Messenger enable easy communication and open new issues of information control and privacy management. We invesigate WhatsApp to understand how Arab people manage their privacy on MIM apps. We find that WhatsApp’s design decisions around adding contacts result in privacy issues of information leakage and unwanted contact through the app

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Poster: A User Study of WhatsApp Privacy Settings Among ArabUsersCitation for published version:Rashidi, Y & Vaniea, K 2015, Poster: A User Study of WhatsApp Privacy Settings Among Arab Users. inProceedings for 36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Peer reviewed versionPublished In:Proceedings for 36th IEEE Symposium on Security and PrivacyGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 05. Apr. 2019Poster: A User Study of WhatsApp Privacy SettingsAmong Arab UsersYasmeen RashidiSchool of Informatics and ComputingIndiana UniversityBloomington, INyrashidi@indiana.eduKami VanieaSchool of Informatics and ComputingIndiana UniversityBloomington, INkvaniea@indiana.eduAbstract—Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) applications(apps) such as WhatsApp Messenger enable easy communicationand open new issues of information control and privacy manage-ment. We invesigate WhatsApp to understand how Arab peoplemanage their privacy on MIM apps. We find that WhatsApp’sdesign decisions around adding contacts result in privacy issuesof information leakage and unwanted contact through the app.Keywords—Privacy; WhatsApp; Mobile Instant Messaging; Us-ability; User Study; Survey; ArabI. INTRODUCTIONMobile Instant Messaging (MIM) applications (apps) suchas WhatsApp Messenger raise interesting privacy issues forend users. This is especially true given the global popularityof such apps, and the variation among cultures in how privacyis traditionally handled. We conducted a survey to learn abouthow Arab people use WhatsApp to communicate with othersand manage their privacy.WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messag-ing app launched in 2009. It was initially a text messagingapp, but its current version allows for the creation of groups,sending media (images, audio and video), sharing of contacts,and sharing the user’s location. WhatsApp is the most popularMIM app in many countries such as Saudi Arabia and isa strong competitor in other counties such as China. In2014, 68% of mobile internet users in the Middle East andAfrica used WhatsApp 1. WhatsApp growth reached about 450million users in its first four years 2. It was initially a free app,but now charges users 99 cents after the first year of use. OnFeb. 19, 2014 Facebook bought WhatsApp with $19 billion2.II. WHATSAPPWhen a user first signs-up with WhatsApp, she has toprovide and verify her phone number which is her uniqueidentifier on the app and is used by others to connect withher. After setup WhatsApp imports the user’s contacts fromthe phone into the internal WhatsApp contact list. The useris automatically given access to all their contacts’ onlineinformation (profile photo, status, and when they were lastseen) depending on the contact’s privacy settings.By default the online information of a user is shared withanyone who has the user as a contact. For example, if Alice1http://www.statista.com/statistics/321460/whatsapp-penetration-regions/2http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsapp/just joined WhatsApp and Bob had previously had her in hiscontact list, then Bob would be automatically given access toAlice’s online information without any explicit consent fromAlice. This would happen even if Bob was not in Alice’scontact list. A user has the option to set online informationas visible to Everyone, My Contacts, or Nobody.A user can create a new WhatsApp contact by simplyadding a phone number to their phone’s contact list. Similarlyto the setup, the new contact is not notified, but the user getsaccess to their online information depending on the settings.III. METHODOLOGYPrior experience with WhatsApp by the researchers indi-cated that the issues of information control, and unwantedcontact were major concerns for WhatsApp users. In orderto better understand how Arab users control their privacyusing WhatsApp, we conducted a survey and used a snowballsampling. The survey focused on how users managed theirprivacy through settings, their attitudes about the app, andprior privacy-related experiences. The survey was translatedinto both English and Arabic.One of the researchers is Arab (Saudi) national and acurrent user of WhatsApp. She used her contacts list toadvertise the survey to Arab WhatsApp users. She also postedadvertisements for the survey on public social networkingpages for Arab in the United States. The participants wereinformed that we are studying WhatsApp privacy settings andthe work was approved by our IRB.A total of 1238 respondents started the online survey, and945 respondents completed it. We focus our analysis on the841 Arab respondents who completed the survey. The majorityof the respondents were women (67.06%, n=564), and about athird were men (30.08%, n=253), with (2.85%, n=24) choosingnot to indicate a gender. Most of them (91.8%) indicated thatthey use WhatsApp on a daily basis to contact family andfriends.IV. RESULTSThe two most interesting results of our survey were theissues of managing privacy settings, and unwanted contact.Group Last Seen Profile Photo StatusEveryone 385 555 577My Contacts 115 220 183Nobody 272 15 28I don’t have this feature 58 29 30No Answer 11 22 23TABLE I. RESPONDENT SELF-REPORTED PRIVACY SETTINGS.Group Always Often Rarely Never No AnswerFriends 481 265 77 3 15Family 522 241 69 6 3Co-Workers 205 243 253 102 38Others 38 66 268 440 29TABLE II. HOW OFTEN RESPONDENTS CONTACT EACH GROUPTHROUGH WHATSAPP.A. Managing Privacy SettingsWhatsApp provides users with the ability to control whocan access their online information. However, there is nocustom group setting, so users must give access to Everyone,My Contacts, or Nobody. Even if the user chooses to restrictaccess to the information she must make an all-or-nothingchoice to either show the information to her whole contactlist, or to show it to no one at all.We asked respondents to report their current WhatsAppprivacy settings. As can be seen in Table I users did decideto make changes to their privacy settings indicating that usersare aware that privacy settings exist and can be changed. Mostnotably, 32.3% decided to completely hide their last seen timestamp but many users still elected to leave their profile photoand status visible to Everyone or Contacts.Although the majority of the users knew that they canmanage their privacy settings using WhatsApp, they havechosen to use everyone or my contacts potentially becausethey want to allow friends and family members to see theironline information.To better understand who are our users interact with onWhatsApp we asked them how often they contact Friends,Family, and Co-workers as well as other people on their contactlist such as drivers, plumbers, and contractors. As expected, re-spondents frequently communicated with Friends and Family.Roughly equal numbers of respondents reported contacting Co-workers Always, Often, and Rarely which makes sense givethat 18.4% of our respondents are unemployed. People rarelycontacted other people with 52.3% indicating that they nevercontacted people in this group through WhatsApp.The most logical setting to use when trying to balanceprivacy with usability is the “My Contact” setting which limitsaccess to people on the phone’s contact list. But just becausea person is on the contact list does not mean the user wishesto share information with them. The coarse granularity of thesettings puts users in a position where they cannot managetheir privacy as they need to.B. Unwanted Contacts and BlockingContacting another user through WhatsApp is easy andcheap provided that you have their phone number or canguess it. About half of the respondents (51.96%) agreed that itbothers them that a stranger can see their online informationReason Women MenHe has my number but I don’t know this person 49.47% 22.13%I have this person’s phone number, but I don’t want him tocontact me over WhatsApp 6.56% 10.67%I don’t want him to be able to see my profile photo and/or status 8.87% 7.51%We are not friends anymore 5.5% 7.51%We had a bad fight 14.36% 21.74%TABLE III. REASONS WHY MEN AND WOMEN CHOSE TO BLOCKPEOPLE.while 31.03% have said maybe. When we asked respondentshow many times they have been contacted by a stranger63.85% said they had been contacted more than once, 18.31%said they had been contacted once, while 15.93% had neverhad a stranger contact them.The only available control for the users is the “blocking”feature which allows a user to block future contact fromanother user. We asked the respondents if they had ever usedthe blocking feature. The majority of the respondents (75.51%)reported using the blocking feature to block a user. Women(81.03%) are more likely to use blocking feature than men(64.03%). However, women and men use blocking for differentreasons. Table III lists the reasons we asked about, and theresponses of both genders. Both genders tended to blockbecause the person was a stranger, or because they had hada fight with the person. Though woman were more likely toblock strangers, and men were more likely to block after fights.It is expected to find that women use block feature to blockstrangers more than men which might due to the conservativeculture and the sensitive relationship between genders in Arabcountries.The problem of managing unwanted communication putsthe burden on the user who has to block each unwantedcontact individually. Unwanted communications invade users’privacy and potentially put them at risk of stalkers who maysimply keep contacting them using different phone numbers.The only choice is to individually block unwanted users’phone numbers, which does not prevent future new unwantedcontacts. A respondent explained in the comment section that:I once I had to delete my phone number becauseof a stalker that kept sending me messages fromdifferent phone numbers. Blocking his numbers wasnot effective. That was a breach of my privacy.V. DISCUSSIONPeople are developing a greater dependence on MIM appli-cations as their primary communication mechanism. Privacy istherefor an important component that should be considered bythe developers of such apps. Our work shows that the emphasisWhatsApp puts on ease of contact and sharing of data putsusers in a position where it is challenging to impossible forthem to manage their privacy.We intentionally investigated Arab culture because of thehigh use of WhatsApp and some of the conservative elementsof the culture. In future work we plan on comparing howpeople in different cultures respond to MIM privacy issues,both in how they manage privacy, and what their privacyexpectations are.

Poster: A User Study of WhatsApp Privacy Settings Among Arab Users

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Poster: A User Study of WhatsApp Privacy Settings Among Arab Users

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