Users’ Perceived Control, Trust and Expectation on Privacy Settings of Smartphone

Abstract

A common issue is that a large number of authorized apps use important and sensitive personal information without arousing users’ full awareness. Existing schemes for privacy protection on smartphones try to provide users with privacy settings to control privacy leakage. Privacy settings on smartphone are intended to inform users about risks of privacy leakage and let users take over control of smartphone. Therefore, it is essential to understand and measure how much users perceive and trust these settings. To this end, we design and conduct a fine-grained online survey with 222 respondents. We collect the demographics as well as users’ smartphone usage, covering not only participants’ basic background information like age, gender, job, but also time of smartphone use per day, respective importance and sensitivity level of personal data, and their smartphone OSs. In this paper, we investigate users’ current privacy perception and protection on smartphone in different groups, discussing participants’ responses to (1) Rating the importance and sensitivity of personal information; (2) Trust on existing privacy protection; (3) Perceived control on smartphone; (4) Frequency of searching privacy knowledge; (5) Concerns about manufacturer and third-party company’s behaviors on personal data and decision.