The authors of this paper did research into how to effectively display privacy information for a web page so the user is best notified. Current privacy notifiers are just seals on a website. The tell almost nothing about the site's actual implementation of security practices; the seal just means there is a seal there. Studying how people reacted to these sites the authors found that most people base their idea of security from the "look and feel" of the website. The authors then constructed a study with four different groups. These were denoted by the security indicator being either just in the search results, in a small window after visiting a site as well as in the search results, as a full page pop-up after visiting a site as well as in the search results, and telling the user that the security indicator was actually a handicap accessibility indicator. The participants of the experiment then would search using a provided rigged search engine to purchase items. People only paid a premium for items from a secure page if there was a privacy indicator. Timing seemed to matter as people that saw the security indicator earlier were more likely to pay a premium, though people who searched multiple sites almost always paid the premium for security. People who saw a full page privacy warning usually paid a premium for all products that they bought. Also, people who had pop-ups of any nature to show privacy information visited 203% more websites to decide where to purchase from.
This paper is important because the every day user doesnt understand just how insecure many of the sites that they purchase from are. The downside to this research is that it only deals with getting people to recognize security as an issue, it doesnt construe any information about the actual security of the website. In the future I would provide a more in depth response available accessible by clicking on the security indicator and find out how many people just trust the image without checking any real settings.
No comments:
Post a Comment