An (Un)Necessary Evil - Users’ (Un)Certainty about Smartphone App Permissions and Implications for Privacy Engineering

in 2022 7th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroSPW) (in press)

App permission requests are a control mechanism meant to help users oversee and safeguard access to data and resources on their smartphones. To decide whether to accept or deny such requests and make this ... [more ▼]

App permission requests are a control mechanism meant to help users oversee and safeguard access to data and resources on their smartphones. To decide whether to accept or deny such requests and make this consent valid, users need to understand the underlying reasons and judge the relevance of disclosing data in line with their own use of an app. This study investigates people’s certainty about app permission requests via an online survey with 400 representative participants of the UK population. The results demonstrate that users are uncertain about the necessity of granting app permissions for about half of the tested permission requests. This implies substantial privacy risks, which are discussed in the paper, resulting in a call for user-protecting interventions by privacy engineers. [less ▲]

Impressions that last: representing the meaningful museum experience

in Behaviour and Information Technology (2022)

Research in human–computer interaction (HCI) has identified meaning as an important, yet poorly understood concept in interaction design contexts. Central to this development is the increasing emphasis on ... [more ▼]

Research in human–computer interaction (HCI) has identified meaning as an important, yet poorly understood concept in interaction design contexts. Central to this development is the increasing emphasis on designing products and technologies that promote leisure, personal fulfillment, and well-being. As spaces of profound historical significance and societal value, museums offer a unique perspective on how people construct meaning during their interactions in museum spaces and with collections, which may help to deepen notions of the content of meaningful interaction and support innovative design for cultural heritage contexts. The present work reports on the results of two studies that investigate meaning-making in museums. The first is an experience narrative study (N = 32) that analyzed 175 memorable museum visits, resulting in the establishment of 23 triggers that inform meaningful interaction in museums. A second study (N = 354) validated the comprehensiveness and generalisability of the triggers by asking participants to apply them to their own memorable museum experiences. We conclude with a framework of meaning in museums featuring the 23 triggers and two descriptive categories of temporality and scope. Our findings contribute to meaning research in HCI for museums through an articulation of the content of meaning-making in the cultural sector. [less ▲]

Cookie Banners, What’s the Purpose? Analyzing Cookie Banner Text Through a Legal Lens

in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '21) (2021, November 15)

A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time, requesting consent to the use of cookies and other trackers for a variety of purposes. Unlike prior work that has focused on ... [more ▼]

A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time, requesting consent to the use of cookies and other trackers for a variety of purposes. Unlike prior work that has focused on evaluating the user interface (UI) design of cookie banners, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of what cookie banners say to users to get their consent. We took an interdisciplinary approach to determining what cookie banners should say. Following the legal requirements of the ePrivacy Directive (ePD) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we manually annotated around 400 cookie banners presented on the most popular English-speaking websites visited by users residing in the EU. We focused on analyzing the purposes of cookie banners and how these purposes were expressed (e.g., any misleading or vague language, any use of jargon). We found that 89% of cookie banners violated applicable laws. In particular, 61% of banners violated the purpose specificity requirement by mentioning vague purposes, including “user experience enhancement”. Further, 30% of banners used positive framing, breaching the freely given and informed consent requirements. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations that regulators can find useful. We also describe future research directions. [less ▲]

Heuristic Evaluation of COVID-19 Chatbots

in Proceedings of CONVERSATIONS 2020 (2020, November 23)