Yang Wang, Pedro Giovanni Leon, Kevin Scott, Xiaoxuan Chen, Alessandro Acquisti, and Lorrie Faith Cranor, Privacy Soft-paternalism: Facebook Users’ Reactions to Privacy Nudges

By privacylaw | May 24, 2013 at 09:49 pm

Comment by: Andrew Clearwater

PLSC 2013

Workshop draft abstract:

Anecdotal evidence and scholarly research have shown that a significant portion of Internet users experience regrets over disclosures they have made online. To explore ways to help individuals avoid or lessen regrets associated with online mistakes, we employed lessons from behavioral decision research and soft- paternalism to develop three Facebook interfaces that “nudge” users to consider the content and context of their online disclosures more carefully before posting. We implemented three nudging interfaces: profile picture, timer, and timer plus sentiment meter.

The picture nudge was designed to remind Facebook users of which individuals are in the audience for their posts. Depending on the particular post privacy setting, users were shown five profile pictures randomly selected from the pool of those who could see their posts. These profile pictures appeared under the status-updates and comment text boxes when users started typing. The timer

nudge was designed to encourage users to stop and think. The warning message

“You will have 10 seconds to cancel after you post the update” with a yellow background was displayed under the status-updates and comment text boxes when users started typing. After clicking on the “Post’” button, users were given the options to “Cancel” or “Edit” their post before it was automatically published after 10 seconds. The third nudge added a sentiment meter to the timer nudge, and the content of each post was analyzed by our sentiment algorithm. This nudge was designed to help make users more aware of how others might perceive their posts. For posts with a positive or negative score a warning message “Other people may perceive your post as {Very Positive, Positive, Negative, Very Negative}” was displayed during the countdown timer.

We tested these nudges in a 3-week field trial with 21 Facebook users, and conducted 13 follow-up interviews. By triangulating system logs of participants’ behavioral data with results from the exit survey and interviews, we found evidence that the nudges had positive influences on some users’ posting behavior, mitigating unintended disclosures. We also found limitations of the current nudge designs and identified future directions for improvement. Our results suggest that a soft-paternalistic approach to protect people’s privacy on social network sites could be potentially beneficial.

Pedro Giovanni Leon, Justin Cranshaw, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Jim Graves, Manoj Hastak, Blase Ur and Guzi Xu, What Do Online Behavioral Advertising Disclosures Communicate to Users?

By privacylaw | May 23, 2013 at 11:20 pm

Pedro Giovanni Leon, Justin Cranshaw, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Jim Graves, Manoj Hastak, Blase Ur and Guzi Xu, What Do Online Behavioral Advertising Disclosures Communicate to Users?

Comment by: Mary Culnan

PLSC 2012

Workshop draft abstract:

In this paper we present the results of a large online user study that

evaluates the industry-promoted mechanism designed to empower users to manage their online behavioral advertising privacy preferences. 700 [we expect about 1200] participants were presented with simulated behavioral advertisements in the context of a simulated and controlled web-browsing session. Subjects were divided into conditions to test two online behavioral advertisement disclosure icons, seven taglines (including no tagline), and five opt-out landing pages. Following this simulation, we surveyed the users about their understanding and perception of the OBA notification elements that they saw. Our [preliminary] results show that users often do not notice the icons or taglines, and that the industry-promoted tagline does a poor job of communicating with users. On the other hand, users found many of the opt-out landing pages to be informative and understandable.

Our results show various levels of effectiveness of disclosure taglines across three dimensions: clickability, notice, and choice. We found that only out about a quarter of participants ever recalled having seen the taglines, and that no tagline was effective at communicating all three concepts to users. We also found that “AdChoices,” the current tagline promoted by industry groups, was among the least communicative of the taglines we tested. Conversely we found that the tagline “Why did I get this ad?” which has recently been adopted by the Google AdSense Network, performed well at communicating clickability and notice. Our work suggests that taglines that suggest an action are more effective at conveying the clickability of the link, which is a critical aspect of the disclosure, allowing users to seek more information or configure their OBA preferences. Furthermore, although none of the symbols was particularly effective at providing notice and choice, we found that the symbols are important at communicating clickability. In particular, the poweri symbol better conveyed clickability than the asterisk man symbol.

We tested the opt-out landing pages provided by AOL, Yahoo!,

Microsoft, Goolge, and Monster [and may test a few more]. All but the Monster Career Ad Network were perceived as informative and

understandable. AOL and Microsoft opt-out pages were shown to be more effective at encouraging users to opt out.

Aleecia McDonald & Lorrie Cranor, An Empirical Study of How People Perceive Online Behavioral Advertising

By privacylaw | May 20, 2013 at 05:13 pm

Aleecia McDonald & Lorrie Cranor, An Empirical Study of How People Perceive Online Behavioral Advertising

Comment by: Joseph Turow

PLSC 2010

Published version available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989092

Workshop draft abstract:

We performed a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 subjects who answered advertisements to participate in a university study about Internet advertising. Subjects were not informed this study had to do with behavioral advertising privacy, but raised privacy concerns on their own unprompted. We asked, “what are the best and worst things about Internet advertising?” and “what do you think about Internet advertising?” Participants held a wide range of views ranging from enthusiasm about ads that inform them of new products and discounts they would not otherwise know about, to resignation that ads are “a fact of life,” to resentment of ads that they find “insulting.” Many participants raised privacy issues in the first few minutes of discussion without any prompting about privacy. We discovered that many participants have a poor understanding of how Internet advertising works, do not understand the use of first-party cookies, let alone third-party cookies, did not realize that behavioral advertising already takes place, believe that their actions online are completely anonymous unless they are logged into a website, and believe that there are legal protections that prohibit companies from sharing information they collect online. We found that participants have substantial confusion about the results of the actions they take within their browsers, do not understand the technology they work with now, and clear cookies as much out of a notion of hygiene as for privacy. When we asked participants to read the NAI opt-out cookie description, only one understood the text. One participant expressed concern the NAI opt-out program was actually a scam to gather additional personal information. No participants had heard of opt-out cookies or flash cookies. We also found divergent views on what constitutes advertising. Industry self-regulation guidelines assume consumers can distinguish third-party widgets from first-party content, and further assume that consumers understand data flows to third-party advertisers. Instead, we find some people are not even aware of when they are being advertised to, let alone aware of what data is collected or how it is used.

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