Visible to the public Context Matters?: How Adding the Obfuscation Option Affects End Users' Data Disclosure Decisions

TitleContext Matters?: How Adding the Obfuscation Option Affects End Users' Data Disclosure Decisions
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsWang, Jing, Wang, Na, Jin, Hongxia
Conference NameProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-4137-0
Keywordscomposability, compositionality, Computational Intelligence, cryptography, data obfuscation, mobile, privacy, pubcrawl, Tracking, user behavior
Abstract

Recent advancement of smart devices and wearable tech-nologies greatly enlarges the variety of personal data people can track. Applications and services can leverage such data to provide better life support, but also impose privacy and security threats. Obfuscation schemes, consequently, have been developed to retain data access while mitigate risks. Compared to offering choices of releasing raw data and not releasing at all, we examine the effect of adding a data obfuscation option on users' disclosure decisions when configuring applications' access, and how that effect varies with data types and application contexts. Our online user experiment shows that users are less likely to block data access when the obfuscation option is available except for locations. This effect significantly differs between applications for domain-specific dynamic tracking data, but not for generic personal traits. We further unpack the role of context and discuss the design opportunities.

URLhttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2856767.2856817
DOI10.1145/2856767.2856817
Citation Keywang_context_2016