Lorrie Faith Cranor

Online dating services present significant privacy risks, especially for LGBTQ+ people who are" in the closet" and have not shared their LGBTQ+ identity with others. We conducted a survey (n= 114) and nine follow-up interviews with US-based, closeted users of online dating services focused on their privacy experience. We found that participants in the study were strongly concerned about the risk of being seen by social relations and institutional data sharing practices like targeted advertising. Participants experienced a range of privacy and safety harms, including inadvertent outing, unauthorized saving and sharing of photos, extortion, and harassment. To protect their privacy, participants typically limited the amount of information and the photos they included in their profile. In order to improve their privacy experience, participants requested better profile visibility controls, limits on the ability of others to download or screenshot their photos, better user verification, and making premium privacy features available for free.

The US Government is developing a package label to help consumers access reliable security and privacy information about Internet of Things (IoT) devices when making purchase decisions. The label will include the US Cyber Trust Mark, a QR code to scan for more details, and potentially additional information. To examine how label information complexity and educational interventions affect comprehension of security and privacy attributes and label QR code use, we conducted an online survey with 518 IoT purchasers. We examined participants’ comprehension and preferences for three labels of varying complexities, with and without an educational intervention. Participants favored and correctly utilized the two higher-complexity labels, showing a special interest in the privacy-relevant content. Furthermore, while the educational intervention improved understanding of the QR code’s purpose, it had a modest effect on QR scanning behavior. We highlight clear design and policy directions for creating and deploying IoT security and privacy labels.

This study examines the content and layout of the proposed broadband consumer disclosure labels mandated by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Our large-scale user study identifies key consumer preferences and comprehension factors through a two-phase survey of 2500 broadband internet consumers. Findings reveal strong support for broadband labels, but dissatisfaction with the FCC's proposed labels from 2016. Participants generally struggled to use the label for cost computations and plan comparisons. Technical terms confused participants, but providing participants with brief education made the terms useable. Participants desired additional information, including reliability, speed measures for both periods when performance is “normal” and periods when performance is much worse than normal, quality-of-experience ratings, and detailed network management practices. This …

Apple and Google introduced their versions of privacy nutrition labels to the mobile app stores to better inform users of the apps' data practices. However, these labels are self-reported by developers and have been found to contain many inaccuracies due to misunderstandings of the label taxonomy. In this work, we present Matcha, an IDE plugin that uses automated code analysis to help developers create accurate Google Play data safety labels. Developers can benefit from Matcha's ability to detect user data accesses and transmissions while staying in control of the generated label by adding custom Java annotations and modifying an auto-generated XML specification. Our evaluation with 12 developers showed that Matcha helped our participants improved the accuracy of a label they created with Google's official tool for a real-world app they developed. We found that participants preferred Matcha for its …

Designs should offer useful information and convenience.

Researchers in the usable privacy and security (UPS) field study privacy-and security-relevant perceptions and behaviors and aim to design systems that simultaneously address requirements for usability/user experience, security, and privacy. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and social science research methods are wellsuited to study many of the types of questions that are relevant in UPS, which often involve concepts such as subjective experience, attitudes, understanding, behavior and behavior change. However, there are many challenges specific to UPS that are not usually described in more generic methods textbooks. We highlight techniques

While privacy perceptions and behaviors have been investigated in Western societies, little is known about these issues in non-Western societies. To bridge this gap, we interviewed 30 Google personal account holders in Saudi Arabia about their privacy perceptions (awareness, attitudes, preferences, and concerns) regarding the activity data that Google saves about them, as well as any steps they take to control Google's collection or use of this data. Our study focuses on Google's Activity Controls, which enable users to control whether, and how, Google saves their Web & App Activity, Location History, and YouTube History. Our results show that although most participants have some level of awareness about Google's data practices and the Activity Controls, many have only vague awareness, and the majority have not used the available controls. When participants viewed their saved activity data, many were surprised by what had been saved. While many participants find Google's use of their data to improve the services provided to them acceptable, the majority find the use of their data for ad purposes unacceptable. We observe that our Saudi participants exhibit similar trends and patterns in privacy awareness, attitudes, preferences, concerns, and behaviors to what has been found in studies in the US. However, our study is not a replication of any of the US studies, and further research is needed to directly compare US and Saudi participants. Our results emphasize the need for: (1) improved techniques to inform users about privacy settings during account sign-up, to remind users about their settings, and to raise awareness about privacy …

In 2017, we published in ACM Computing Surveys a review of the rapidly expanding field of research on behavioral hurdles and nudges in privacy and information security. In this chapter, we augment that review by considering novel research and interesting developments in this area. We consider the expanding literature on privacy behavioral and decision-making hurdles, the ongoing debate on rationality in consumer decision-making, and the so-called privacy paradox, as well as the expanding literature on both nudges and deceptive patterns (also known as “dark patterns”). We conclude by examining the effectiveness of nudges as tools for helping individuals manage their privacy online.