User-to-User Privacy in Social and Communications Applications
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Cobb, Camille
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Abstract
Many people use social and communications applications that routinely expose potentially private information to friends, family, coworkers, and even strangers. This dissertation focuses on the interpersonal or "User-to-User (U2U)" privacy risks and concerns that arise in social and communications applications. I identified that U2U Privacy considerations are particularly relevant in the context of online dating, which I studied through a survey of 100 online dating users, follow-up interviews with 14 survey participants, and direct observation of 400 Tinder profiles. I found a wide range of potential information leakage channels, user practices, and privacy expectations in this specific application class. For example, Online Status Indicators (OSIs), which I observed in several online dating applications, represent one facet of online self-presentation that users may want to control. Many apps besides online dating apps also have OSIs -- including Facebook, Instagram, and Google Hangouts. To expand our understanding of U2U Privacy issues beyond the specific context of online dating, I performed an analysis of the OSI design space across 40 applications from diverse app genres, and I surveyed 200 people to understand how OSIs affect their engagement with social and communications apps. I found that OSIs lead to app-dependent behaviors (i.e., when users contort their behavior to meet the demands of an app). A theme that emerged as particularly relevant throughout this work is that many design choices affecting U2U Privacy represent nuanced trade-offs between privacy and other user goals, privacy for one group of users versus another, or competing aspects of privacy. To enable app designers and future researchers to study these trade-offs more broadly, I have developed a methodology called "Would You Rather" that encourages users to directly consider and express preferences related to technology.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019
Keywords
Human-Computer Interaction, Privacy, Security, Computer science