Usable Security

http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2007/proceedings/p112_conti.pdf

Data gathering and retention is becoming an ever greater part of using the Internet.  Users can choose not to be users, or they can choose to give away their data.  Google was used as an example of such a data gatherer, though it was also mentioned that Google has announced that it will only retain personally identifiable information for 18 months, but many sites have yet to make such assurances.

Goals of research

• Amount of search activity as well as search engine used
• Perceptions of privacy
• Choices made in privacy vs.  functionality

Here are some interesting findings from the paper, but the paper has much more detail:

The study involved 352 non-eng undergraduate students using a web-based 4-point Likert survey with 25 randomly ordered questions asking about web usage, search engine privacy, trust of online companies, data retention, and anonymity.  The study found that 92.44% of the students indicated that they use Google as their primary search engine.  The study then asked why they chose the search engine they did, with only 34% selecting 3 or 4 for “It came with my computer”, 89% indicating 3 or 4 to because “I feel it provides the best search”, and 96% giving 3 or 4 because they felt it was the easiest to use.  Interesting, only 32% said they chose it because of other products offered by the company.  70.69% indicated they were comfortable with the privacy they have using their preferred search engine.

95% of respondents indicated they had used a search engine to search for their own name at least once, with 82% indicating they had used a search engine to look up contact info for friends and/or colleagues.  There was an even split between the users that would choose perfect search vs.  perfect privacy.  The vast majority of results across companies fell between limited trust and reasonable trust.

The study then examined user perception of data retention.  The vast majority of respondents indicated that they understand that data retention is occurring frequently to always, with 38% believing it would be stored for months and 45% believing it would be store for years or decades.  Interestingly, for the group questions 91% of respondents indicated they hadn’t heard about the August 2006 AOL data disclosure.  Only 22% of users indicated that they believed their search engine usage is anonymous, with 85% saying they don’t know any way to go about doing an anonymous search.

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