Effects of Privacy Notification Style and Frequency on Phone Usage

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many proposed mechanisms for helping people understand the security or privacy of their information involve notifying users at various times regarding how that information is used or shared. However, there is a limit as to how many notifications users could attend to, and increasing the frequency and intrusiveness of the notifications will at some point reduce their effectiveness. We do not yet have good guidelines regarding such tradeoffs for different styles of notifications. In this article, we compare users’ reactions and perceived usefulness of notifications of information access on a smart phone, testing the boundaries of acceptability for four different modes of notifications. Our results indicate that the notifications did increase participants’ awareness of information access, but that even for relatively passive notifications, people became annoyed at fairly low frequencies, and phone use was reduced as frequencies increased.