Indirect Content Privacy Surveys: Measuring Privacy Without Asking About It
Venue
Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), ACM SIGCHI (2011)
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Alex Braunstein, Laura Granka, Jessica Staddon
BibTeX
Abstract
The strong emotional reaction elicited by privacy issues is well documented (e.g.,
[12, 8]). The emotional aspect of privacy makes it difficult to evaluate privacy
concern, and directly asking about a privacy issue may result in an emo- tional
reaction and a biased response. This effect may be partly responsible for the
dramatic privacy concern ratings coming from recent surveys, ratings that often
seem to be at odds with user behavior. In this paper we propose indirect techniques
for measuring content privacy concerns through surveys, thus hopefully diminishing
any emotional response. We present a design for indirect surveys and test the
design’s use as (1) a means to measure relative privacy concerns across content
types, (2) a tool for predicting unwillingness to share content (a possible
indicator of privacy concern), and (3) a gauge for two underlying dimensions of
privacy – content importance and the willingness to share content. Our evaluation
consists of 3 surveys, taken by 200 users each, in which privacy is never asked
about directly, but privacy warnings are issued with increasing escalation in the
instruc- tions and individual question-wording. We demonstrate that this escalation
results in statistically and practically signif- icant differences in responses to
individual questions. In addition, we compare results against a direct privacy
survey and show that rankings of privacy concerns are increasingly preserved as
privacy language increases in the indirect sur- veys, thus indicating our mapping
of the indirect questions to privacy ratings is accurately reflecting privacy
concerns.
