Addressing The Privacy Paradox through Personalized Privacy Notifications

Abstract

Privacy behaviors of individuals are often inconsistent with their stated attitudes, a phenomenon known as the "privacy paradox." These inconsistencies may lead to troublesome or regrettable experiences. To help people address these privacy inconsistencies, we propose a personalized privacy notification approach that juxtaposes users' general privacy attitudes towards specific technologies and the potential privacy riskiness of particular instances of such technology, right when users make decisions about whether and/or how to use the technology under consideration. Highlighting the privacy inconsistencies to users was designed to nudge them in making decisions in a way that aligns with their privacy attitudes. To illustrate this approach, we chose the domain of mobile apps and designed a privacy discrepancy interface that highlights this discrepancy between users' general privacy attitudes towards mobile apps and the potential privacy riskiness of a particular app, nudging them to make app installation and/or permission granting decisions reflecting their privacy attitudes. To evaluate this interface, we conducted an online experiment simulating the process of installing Android apps. We compared the privacy discrepancy approach with several existing privacy notification approaches. Our results suggest that the behaviors of participants who used the privacy discrepancy interface better reflected their privacy attitudes than the other approaches.