Two upcoming talks at two Singaporean universities:

  1. July 31st, 2017 (Monday), 11:00 – 12:00. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. More information here.
  2. August 2nd, 2017 (Wedensday), 1:30pm – 3:00pm, at the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, National University of Singapore. More information can be found at the seminar’s page.

I (Eran, that is) will be discussing work carried out by Rony Hirschprung and Lena Petrykina in our lab.

Title: Understanding and Optimising Choice Architectures for Privacy and Security

Abstract: Choice Architectures, the design of interfaces in which choices are presented to users, have a tremendous effect on people’s decisions. Even subtle changes in the choice architecture, such as the selection of default options, can significantly alter the decisions of users, nudging them to specific directions, and even change the way they perceive their possibilities. In this talk, we will discuss several studies that analysed and optimised choice architectures to enhance users’ privacy and security decisions. We will start by reviewing the relation between the economic view of choice architecture and the design of actual user interfaces for making choices in the context of data privacy and security. We will introduce concepts such as population coverage and fairness that quantitatively model the choice architecture, and see how these concepts can be used to empirically analyse systems such as social networks and security warning systems. Finally, we will learn how choice architectures can be optimised to reflect users’ actual preferences, and how we can effectively nudge users towards a more secure behaviour.