Abstract

During everyday web browsing and search users reveal many pieces of private information to third parties. Even though people report being concerned about their privacy online, they often do not take steps to protect it. This is known as the 'privacy paradox' in the literature. In this work we study two well-known strategies based on theories from the behavioral sciences, nudging and boosting, which encourage users to browse in a way that their private data are less exposed. First, an online survey (N=127) tested the comprehensibility and efficacy of various facts (boosts), before the most effective of these were evaluated against 'nudge' interventions previously shown to be efficacious in lab-studies. A three week naturalistic study (N=68) using a browser extension revealed that both nudges and boosts improve browsing privacy, as approximated by different measures. Boosts are also shown to improve user knowledge about privacy in the short term, but the benefit weakens over time.

Highlights

  • World wide, users spend almost 7 hours per day online [44], e.g. searching for information or browsing the web

  • Even though there are other threats to online privacy, such as insecure data storage, we focus on web tracking, since it can be operationalized to measure browsing privacy

  • We further characterized our sample by looking at their device and browser usage and their browsing behavior and were able to verify the information concerning website categories and privacy, which was used in boosts

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Summary

Introduction

Users spend almost 7 hours per day online [44], e.g. searching for information or browsing the web. This can expose private data, which can be harvested and used for many different purposes [31], leading to, e.g. search or price discrimination [59], targeted advertising [20] or even identity theft [12]. Despite many users expressing concern about their privacy online, they seldom take actions to protect it [45]. This is known as the privacy paradox [61]. If users could be persuaded to change their actions, they, themselves, may provide a solution

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