Julia Gideon, Serge Egelman, Lorrie Faith Cranor, and Alessandro Acquisti: Power Strips, Prophylactics, and Privacy, Oh My!
July 14, 2006 by PingThe authors studied Privacy Finder, a search engine whose result lists are enhanced with privacy information from websites’ P3P policies. Their study investigated whether this additional privacy information would affect user behaviour.
Participants in the user study were asked to shop online for two products: first, a six-outlet surge protector, and second, a twelve-pack of condoms. In the control group, the search engine just yielded list of results; in the experimental group, the results were augmented with privacy bird indicators. The same list of results was shown in both conditions.
The experiment found that with privacy-enhanced search, users were more likely to use sites with better privacy policies, and the effect was much stronger when purchasing condoms than when purchasing power strips.
July 14th, 2006 at 10:32
I wonder if there was much discussion at the Review Board (IRB/REB) about having users purchase with their real cards. Users were taking some risks when making purchases, as we all do when we buy on the net.
Would it be worthwhile to share the IRB documents?