Privacy at a Glance: The User-Centric Design of Glanceable Data Exposure Visualizations
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Abstract
Smartphone users are often unaware of mobile
applications’ (“apps”) third-party data collection
and sharing practices, which put them at higher risk
of privacy breaches. One way to raise awareness of
these practices is by providing unobtrusive but pervasive
visualizations that can be presented in a glanceable
manner. In this paper, we applied Wogalter et al.’s
Communication-Human Information Processing model
(C-HIP) to design and prototype eight different visualizations
that depict smartphone apps’ data sharing activities.
We varied the granularity and type (i.e., datacentric
or app-centric) of information shown to users
and used the screensaver/lock screen as a design probe.
Through interview-based design probes with Android
users (n=15), we investigated the aspects of the data
exposure visualizations that influenced users’ comprehension
and privacy awareness. Our results shed light on
how users’ perceptions of privacy boundaries influence
their preference regarding the information structure of
these visualizations, and the tensions that exist in these
visualizations between glanceability and granularity.We
discuss how a pervasive, soft paternalistic approach to
privacy-related visualization may raise awareness by enhancing
the transparency of information flow, thereby,
unobtrusively increasing users’ understanding of data
sharing practices of mobile apps. We also discuss implications
for privacy research and glanceable security.
Description
Keywords
Privacy, User, Design, Qualitative, Mobile
Citation
Wilkinson, D., Bahirat, P., Namara, M., Lyu, J., Alsubhi, A., Qiu, J., ... & Knijnenburg, B. P. (2020). Privacy at a glance: the user-centric design of glanceable data exposure visualizations. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2020(2), 416-435. DOI 10.2478/popets-2020-0034