"If You Put All The Pieces Together..."

Abstract

Online services often rely on processing users' data, which can be either provided directly by the users or combined from other services. Although users are aware of the latter, it is unclear whether they are comfortable with such data combination, whether they view it as beneficial for them, or the extent to which they believe that their privacy is exposed. Through an online survey (N=918) and follow-up interviews (N=14), we show that (1) comfort is highly dependent on the type of data, type of service and on the existence of a direct relationship with a company, (2) users have a highly different opinion about the presence of benefits for them, irrespectively of the context, and (3) users perceive the combination of online data as more identifying than data related to offline and physical behavior (such as location). Finally, we discuss several strategies for companies to improve upon these issues.

Challenges of using Personal Data to Drive Personalised Electronic Programme Guides

“…Usable privacy has been a significant application domain in HCI in the recent years [1,5,6,14,26]. Research has consistently highlighted the importance of making the user more involved in the data exchange process through better data legibility and control [32].…”

Is everything under control? An experimental study on how control over data influences trust in and support for major governmental data exchange projects

“…Contributions in this line argue that data collection procedures are often opaque in nature (Malhotra et al, 2004), requiring citizens to place a certain amount of trust in the data processor that data will not be misused. Such misuse might come in various forms, such as the use of data for purposes that are not considered desirable or the recombination of data against the wishes of the person providing the data (Whitley, 2009;Bilogrevic & Ortlieb, 2016;Malhotra et al, 2004). What is more, considering that data is often stored long-term, this brings about further unease on data storage terms and the potential for future misuse (Van Ooijen & Vrabec, 2019).…”

"It's your private information. it's your life."

“…Data collected about a user may be used to profile them, whether this data is from a single source or combined from several different sources; for example location data may be used to infer other sensitive details such as income or political views [38]. Little is known about attitudes towards data combination and sharing, although users have been found to be least comfortable with payment details being shared with third parties, followed by online search and browsing history; users also recognised that data sharing was more beneficial to the companies than the users [6]. There are calls for greater transparency and control over the way data is collected and used [66], with suggestions that this may temper concerns and users would be more inclined to accept that it happens [9,37].…”