Oshrat’s presentation at SOUPS 2019 is now accessible online.

Oshrat presents our paper, Evaluating Users’ Perceptions about a System’s Privacy: Differentiating Social and Institutional Aspects

The paper asks a pretty simple question: can we use A/B testing, a classic user-centered design method, to tackle privacy flaws in design processes? The answer is: that depends on the feature you want to test. Users are keen to detect and flag privacy intrusions in social settings, but not so much in other settings.

Abstract: System design has a crucial effect on users’ privacy, but privacy-by-design processes in organizations rarely involve end-users. To bridge this gap, we investigate how User-Centered Design (UCD) concepts can be used to test how users perceive their privacy in system designs. We describe a series of three online experiments, with 1,313 participants overall, in which we attempt to develop and validate the reliability of a scale for Users’ Perceived Systems’ Privacy (UPSP). We found that users’ privacy perceptions of information systems consist of three distinctive aspects: institutional, social and risk. We combined our scale with A/B testing methodology to compare different privacy design variants for given background scenarios. Our results point that A/B testing methodology and the scale are mostly applicable for evaluating privacy designs in the context of a social aspect.