Sharing information online rationally: An observation of user privacy concerns and awareness using serious game

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that excessive online information disclosure is a major reason of privacy breach. It makes it easy for social engineers to gather information about their targets. The objective of this study is to gather user privacy concerns reported in the literature and categorize them into themes, then design a serious game covering the categorized privacy concerns and evaluate the educational effect of the game regarding dangers associated with excessive online information disclosure. We have conducted a literature review and extracted user privacy concerns reported in 109+ publications. Then we designed a serious game and empirically evaluated the game players awareness of dangers associated with excessive online information disclosure. We find that privacy awareness has a positive long-term impact on users online behavior in terms of controlled information sharing. However, social networking needs drive users to share information online, even knowing the potential risks. The proposed serious game shows positive effect in improving the privacy awareness of participants.