Visible to the public Governance for Big Data - July 2021Conflict Detection Enabled

Submitted by Serge Egelman on Thu, 08/26/2021 - 11:36am

PI(s), Co-PI(s), Researchers:

  • Serge Egelman (ICSI)
  • Alisa Frik (ICSI)
  • Julia Bernd (ICSI)

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED
Human Behavior, Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration

PUBLICATIONS

  • Tahaei, Mohammad, Alisa Frik, and Kami Vaniea. 2021. "Deciding on Personalized Ads: Nudging Developers About User Privacy." Symposium on Usaable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). USENIX. https://doi.org/10.7488/DS/3045 (To appear.)

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

  • With colleagues at University of Bristol, we are initiating a research study to examine how developers of mobile health apps approach privacy for those apps, including app developers' expectations and beliefs about legal protections for health data, technical possibilities for protecting privacy, and users' expectations and preferences.

    As a first step, we are analyzing posts on StackOverflow to develop an initial sketch of some of the technical concerns and issues developers of health apps have about the privacy of the data they are dealing with, and who or what is driving those issues or concerns. For example, many questions in the last few years are related to the permissions requirements for the health-specific APIs provided by mobile platforms (Apple's HealthKit, Google Fit, Samsung Health).

    Our next step will be to conduct interviews with app developers to broaden our view of how they approach health data.
  • At the same time, we are preparing to conduct studies of users' privacy expectations about health apps and what those expectations are based on -- for example, do users reason about data handling by consumer fitness apps based on their expectations for data collected in medical contexts? Results from this study will be compared with results from studies of apps' actual behavior and of their privacy policies (currently being conducted in our lab or by our collaborators, under separate funding).
  • With colleagues at Aalto University in Finland, we are preparing to conduct a related study with healthcare professionals on their views of consumer health apps. We are currently preparing to submit the interview study design for ethics review.
  • Our paper on how ad networks' framing of privacy choices influences whether developers include personalized or non-personalized ads in mobile apps (citation above), described in our April report, was accepted and will be presented at SOUPS in August.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENTS

  • Nothing to report this quarter.

EDUCATIONAL ADVANCES:

  • Nothing to report this quarter.
Groups: