2022/11/14 by Jenny Tang, Tang, Jenny, Hannah Shoemaker +7
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Impact of Technology on Adolescents #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology #cs.CR #cs.HC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2211.07235
arxiv created 2022/11/14 · openalex publication_date 2022/11/14 · arxiv updated 2022/11/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors impact perceptions of threat, including social factors, political speech, and user-interface design. In this work, we investigate how user-visible context clues impact perceptions about whether a mobile application application poses a privacy threat. We conduct a user study with 2109 users in which we find that users depend on context clues -- such as presence of advertising and occurrence (and timing of payment) -- to determine the extent to which a mobile app poses a privacy threat. We also quantify how accurately user assessments match published data collection practices, and we identify a commonly-held misconception about how payments are processed. This work provides new insight into how users assess the privacy threat posed by mobile apps and into social norms around data collection.