At-home DNA testing has become increasingly popular due to the ability to be able to gain both ancestry and health information, as well as connect with others who share your DNA. Do users have reasonable mental models of how these systems work? Do users have privacy concerns and what do they understand as the benefits and risks involved? We conducted 27 interviews with Canadian users of at-home DNA testing companies. Our interviews covered perceived and desired data use, data management, data sharing practices, control over data, and any regrets. Our qualitative analysis revealed that many users have inconsistencies in their mental models and liken their DNA data to their data stored with existing technologies, such as social media, rather than health data. They are generally either dismissive of privacy concerns towards themselves or their relatives or they had not considered privacy in their choice. We discuss our findings and propose possible future work in this area.
Privacy policies as a means of communicating with customers still prove ineffective. Researchers have recently suggested that a specific usage context should be considered to make privacy notices more relevant to users. To explore this approach further, we conducted an explorative online survey of privacy concerns and privacy information preferences with 642 participants for two different contexts (loyalty cards and fitness tracking). Our data shows some support for the suggestion that context may be a significant moderator of concerns and preferences. However, the corresponding effects are rather small and limited to specific concerns and information categories. In line with other research, the data supports the known hierarchy of concerns regarding unauthorized secondary use and improper data access, which seem to exceed concerns about erroneous data processing or excessive data collection in both contexts. Furthermore, participants considered information on personal rights and processing purposes more relevant than information on contact persons.
Has widespread news of abuse changed the public's perceptions of how user-contributed content from social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can be used? We collected two datasets that reflect participants' attitudes about content ownership, privacy, and control, one in April 2018, while Cambridge Analytica was still in the news, and another in February 2019, after the event had faded from the headlines, and aggregated the data according to participants' awareness of the story, contrasting the attitudes of those who reported the greatest awareness with those who reported the least. Participants with the greatest awareness of the news story's details have more polarized attitudes about reuse, especially the reuse of content as data. They express a heightened desire for data mobility, greater concern about networked privacy rights, increased skepticism of algorithmically targeted advertising and news, and more willingness for social media platforms to demand corrections of inaccurate or deceptive content.
With the rapid adoption of smart speakers in people's homes, there is a corresponding increase in users' privacy and security concerns. In contrast to previous studies of users' concerns about smart speakers' divulging private information to their manufacturers, our study focused on investigating users' concerns with regard to housemates and external entities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 participants living in 21 households. Our results suggest that users often have an inadequate understanding of what data their smart speakers makes available to all users and what is kept private. Although participants expressed different privacy concerns about their housemates and external entities, they adopted similar, yet suboptimal, risk management strategies. We provide recommendations for future speaker design to support more optimal coping with the perceived risks.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376529
In recent years, social media services have been leveraged to spread fake news stories. Helping people spot fake stories by marking them with credibility indicators could dissuade them from sharing such stories, thus reducing their amplification. We carried out an online study (N = 1,512) to explore the impact of four types of credibility indicators on people's intent to share news headlines with their friends on social media. We confirmed that credibility indicators can indeed decrease the propensity to share fake news. However, the impact of the indicators varied, with fact checking services being the most effective. We further found notable differences in responses to the indicators based on demographic and personal characteristics and social media usage frequency. Our findings have important implications for curbing the spread of misinformation via social media platforms.