Standing out among the daily spam: How to catch website owners’ attention by means of vulnerability notifications

Hennig, Anne; Neusser, Fabian; Pawelek, Aleksandra Alicja; Herrmann, Dominik; Mayer, Peter

doi:10.1145/3491101.3519847

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Several researchers [3,4,34] highlight a high need for usable tools that help expert users to identify and fix privacy issues and check compliance. Preliminary studies have evaluated support approaches for expert users in practice, e. g., sending notifications to raise awareness for privacy and security issues on their website [7,8,15,22,25,26,36,37,46,49] and providing verification tools [26].…”

Section: Expert Users' Perspective On Privacymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Utz et al [44] found that WOs often rely on easy-to-use default solutions, whereas website visitor privacy only plays a minor role when deciding to adopt a third-party service. Other studies focused on notifying WOs about privacy or security issues on their website [7,8,15,22,25,26,36,37,46,49]. For example, Maass et al [26] ran a survey in combination with sending out notifications to inform WOs who used Google Analytics (GA) but had not turned on the IP anonymization (AIP) feature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Website Owners Face Privacy Issues: Thematic Analysis of Responses from a Covert Notification Study Reveals Diverse Circumstances and Challenges

Stöver

Gerber

Pridöhl

et al. 2023

PoPETs

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Many websites contain services from third parties. Misconfigurations of these services can lead to missing compliance with legal obligations and privacy risks for website users. Previous research indicates that one cause for such privacy issues is missing awareness. However, reasons for the missing awareness and other reasons for the prevalence of privacy issues are not widely researched; that includes website owners’ dealing with those issues. To shed light on the issue, we analyze 1043 responses from website owners to a notification about a privacy issue on their website using thematic analysis, following an exploratory and qualitative approach. Our analysis shows that, next to unawareness of the issue, incorrect technical implementation and ambiguous responsibilities are among the reasons for privacy issues. Also, website owners face different challenges, such as a lack of knowledge or slow organizational coordination and processes. In addition, our results show that the circumstances in which they operate their website influences how they act and what challenges they face. To illustrate these differences in website owners, we derive three personas from our thematic analysis: (1) the Ignorant Hobbyist, (2) the Busy Self-Employed, and (3) the Informed Multi-Stakeholder. These personas cover the majority of the aspects of the analyzed responses and represent the diversity of website owners and their backgrounds. Given the challenges and backgrounds of website owners, we discuss which prerequisites must be fulfilled to remediate privacy issues on websites. Finally, we present measures that support website owners in remediating privacy issues and show how to adapt these measures to the needs of different website owners. We hope that better support for website owners will also lead to better privacy for website visitors.

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