What are the true cost of annoying ads? Or the trust cost of free mobile applications? Two very different studies looked at those questions. This paper, accepted to WWW, used an interesting methodology to vouch the impact of ad annoyance. They asked Mechanical Turk workers to rate ads for annoyance, and measured the performance of other workers doing some random task with those ads.
Another interesting methodology was used i investigating the price of privacy. The economic aspect of privacy has been a paradox for many observers. This work (in Hebrew) used market research methodologies to try to understand how much users are actually paying for compromised privacy. The paper shows that free applications, most of them make their money from advertisements, require significantly more permissions compared to paid applications.
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