Influence of Privacy Attitude and Privacy Cue Framing on Android App Choices
Transmission of personally identifiable information from smartphone apps has become ubiquitous as smartphones themselves. Privacy controls provided in the form of permissions warnings falls insu cient especially for communicating risk during app installation. Presenting easy to understand privacy risk icons/cues would help people make low risk app choices. However, the human factor requirements for designing such privacy risk icons are largely unknown. Towards this, we conducted a user experiment with 480 participants who made a series of app choices with/without privacy priming and with/without privacy risk communicating icons. Overall, presenting risk communicating icons along with app benefit icons had a significant e ect on user app choices in terms of riskbenefit trade o We found that one type of privacy icon framing led to mediocre app choices under particular conditions. We found that priming for privacy led to increased concern while choosing apps but did not have an augmenting e ect on final app choices when combined with certain type of privacy framing. We conclude by proposing human factor based recommendations for designing privacy risk communicating icons.
WPI@SOUPS