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"I had no idea this was a thing": on the importance of understanding the user experience of personalized transparency tools

Published: 05 December 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Personalization has the potential to improve the effectiveness of "generic" privacy notices and policies, however, little is known about the user impact of the personalized transparency tools available today. While regulators consistently endorse transparency, the popular press often couches existing tools in negative and cautionary tones. In a pilot study of two personalized online transparency tools, Google's My Activity and Google Ads Settings, we find the user experience of these tools is difficult to study due to low user-awareness and limited user data accessible to the tools. However, for those users with sufficient data accessible to the tools, we find no evidence that these tools are harmful to user trust and privacy attitudes.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Analysis of Google Ads Settings Over Time: Updated, Individualized, Accurate, and FilteredProceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society10.1145/3603216.3624968(167-172)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2023
  • (2023)AutoML in The Wild: Obstacles, Workarounds, and ExpectationsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581082(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Youths' Perceptions of Data Collection in Online Advertising and Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555766:CSCW2(1-27)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
STAST '16: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust
December 2016
101 pages
ISBN:9781450348263
DOI:10.1145/3046055
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 December 2016

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STAST '16
STAST '16: Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust
December 5, 2016
California, Los Angeles

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View all
  • (2023)Analysis of Google Ads Settings Over Time: Updated, Individualized, Accurate, and FilteredProceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society10.1145/3603216.3624968(167-172)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2023
  • (2023)AutoML in The Wild: Obstacles, Workarounds, and ExpectationsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581082(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Youths' Perceptions of Data Collection in Online Advertising and Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555766:CSCW2(1-27)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Towards a multi-stakeholder value-based assessment framework for algorithmic systemsProceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3531146.3533118(535-563)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2022

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