Enhancing Privacy through the Visual Design of Privacy Notices: Exploring the Interplay of Curiosity, Control and Affect

Kitkowska, Agnieszka, Warner, Mark, Shulman, Yefim, Wästlund, Erik and Martucci, Leonardo (2020) Enhancing Privacy through the Visual Design of Privacy Notices: Exploring the Interplay of Curiosity, Control and Affect. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2020). USENIX Association, Dover, DE, pp. 437-456. ISBN 9781939133168

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Abstract

Privacy policies are the initial communicators of the services' data handling practices. Yet, their design seldom ensures users' privacy comprehension or provides people with choices around their information management, resulting in negative feelings associated with the sign-up process. In this paper, we investigate how to improve these conditions to enhance privacy comprehension and management, while inducing more positive feelings towards privacy notices. In an online experiment (N=620), we examine factors active during privacy interactions: curiosity, privacy concerns, trust, and time. We study how, together with framing and control incorporated in visual designs of notices, these factors influence privacy comprehension, intention to disclose, and affect (negative-positive valence). Our results show that, depending on an individual's level of curiosity, control can influence privacy comprehension, disclosure, and valence. We demonstrate the moderating ability of valence on privacy concerns, indirectly affecting disclosures. We elaborate on the results, highlighting how privacy notices designed to activate curiosity and provide control, could enhance usability and strengthen privacy-conscious behaviors. We argue that future work should study affect to further the knowledge of its role in cognitive processing resulting from privacy interactions.

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