Explaining the Technology Use Behavior of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies: The Case of Tor and JonDonym

Abstract

Today’s environment of data-driven business models relies heavily on collecting as much personal data as possible. Besides being protected by governmental regulation, internet users can also try to protect their privacy on an individual basis. One of the most famous ways to accomplish this, is to use privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). However, the number of users is particularly important for the anonymity set of the service. The more users use the service, the more difficult it will be to trace an individual user. There is a lot of research determining the technical properties of PETs like Tor or JonDonym, but the use behavior of the users is rarely considered, although it is a decisive factor for the acceptance of a PET. Therefore, it is an important driver for increasing the user base.We undertake a first step towards understanding the use behavior of PETs employing a mixed-method approach. We conducted an online survey with 265 users of the anonymity services Tor and JonDonym (124 users of Tor and 141 users of JonDonym). We use the technology acceptance model as a theoretical starting point and extend it with the constructs perceived anonymity and trust in the service in order to take account for the specific nature of PETs. Our model explains almost half of the variance of the behavioral intention to use the two PETs. The results indicate that both newly added variables are highly relevant factors in the path model. We augment these insights with a qualitative analysis of answers to open questions about the users’ concerns, the circumstances under which they would pay money and choose a paid premium tariff (only for JonDonym), features they would like to have and why they would or would not recommend Tor/JonDonym. Thereby, we provide additional insights about the users’ attitudes and perceptions of the services and propose new use factors not covered by our model for future research.

Hands off my data: users’ security concerns and intention to adopt privacy enhancing technologies

“…online anonymity-granting software and applications, are among the most important users-oriented PETs in circulation (Nia and Martinez 2018;Spiekermann 2005). Despite PETs being as old as the web itself (Fritsch 2007), research has largely focused on their technical features while the role of users has been overlooked (Harborth et al 2020). As a matter of fact, looking closely at the literature to date reveals three separate research branches in studies on PETs.…”

“…Compared to the first two research streams, this third one is still in its infancy and therefore comparatively smaller. Namara et al (2020) and Harborth et al (2020) recently mentioned how surprising it is that empirical research on what motivates users to adopt PETs is still underdeveloped, considering their overall service quality and cost-effectiveness, which dramatically depends on the degree of diffusion they are able to achieve. The few available publications that explain users' adoption of PETs (or intention to adopt them) have relied on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis 1985) (see Table 1 for an overview), extending this pioneering theory on why people do or do not use technologies, to encompass variables suited to measuring users' perceptions of PET-specific attributes.…”

“…A careful analysis of current literature dealing with online anonymizers (reported below) reveals that extant research focuses largely on these technologies' technical features, and overlooks the role of the users and their use behaviors. As Harborth et al (2020) have recently stated, despite acceptance that PETs' wide penetration is tightly connected to a deep understanding of usage behavior, literature to build such understanding is still very scant. In addition, the few studies available to date expose at least three other important research gaps.…”

Tor Hidden Services: A Systematic Literature Review

“…As mentioned previously, due to its popularity and the services it offers, Tor has been broadly studied and many issues regarding it has been analysed. It has been analysed both from user's point of view [14] and a technical point of view [5,11,13]. Being the technical studies the most common.…”

Tor Hidden Services: A Systematic Literature Review

“…As mentioned previously, due to its popularity and the services it offers, Tor has been broadly studied and many issues regarding it have been analysed. It has been analysed both from the user's point of view [17] and a technical point of view [5,12,15]. Technical studies are the most common analyses.…”