The Impact of Timing on the Salience of Smartphone App Privacy Notices

Abstract

In a series of experiments, we examined how the timing impacts the salience of smartphone app privacy notices. In a web survey and a field experiment, we isolated different timing conditions for displaying privacy notices: in the app store, when an app is started, during app use, and after app use. Participants installed and played a history quiz app, either virtually or on their phone. After a distraction or delay they were asked to recall the privacy notice's content. Recall was used as a proxy for the attention paid to and salience of the notice. Showing the notice during app use significantly increased recall rates over showing it in the app store. In a follow-up web survey, we tested alternative app store notices, which improved recall but did not perform as well as notices shown during app use. The results suggest that even if a notice contains information users care about, it is unlikely to be recalled if only shown in the app store.

The impact of transparency on mobile privacy decision making

“…Such networked business models have substantial implications for data privacy because personal information is shared between and processed by a high number of actors (Wohlgemuth et al 2014). Mobile operating systems feature safeguards against unauthorized access to personal information, and apps must request permission from users for these services prior to installation or at runtime (Aydin et al 2017;Balebako et al 2015). App providers can enrich runtime permission requests with custom explanations by adding a textual description to the mobile operating systems' inbuilt formal request dialogues (Tan et al 2014).…”

Modeling and analysis of influence power for information security decisions

“…Recently researchers have started to study nudging in the context of security and privacy decision making [9] [14], [15], [16]; the case study in this paper is an example of nudging from [9]. In security, nudging is potentially a soft and flexible alternative to the more common approach of strict compliance to a security policy.…”

“…That is, it is not always obvious in which direction to nudge. However, as shown in [15] for WiFi selection and in [14], [16] for privacy, if an objective is agreed, then influencing can be an effective approach to improving security and privacy without restricting the user's choices.…”

Privacy Salience: Taxonomies and Research Opportunities

“…When the consequences of lax privacy were illustrated, over half the participants changed their permissions. Balebako et al [7] explored the timing of privacy notices through an Android field experiment. They found salience was increased more by in-app dialogs than those shown before installation.…”