Eyeing your exposure: quantifying and controlling information sharing for improved privacy

• Authors: Roman Schlegel;Apu Kapadia;Adam J. Lee
• Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
• Year: 2011

A large body of research has focused on disclosure policies for controlling information release in social sharing (e.g., location-based) applications. However, less work has considered how exposed these policies actually leave users; i.e., to what extent are disclosures in compliance with these policies actually being made? For instance, consider a disclosure policy granting Alice's coworkers access to her location during work hours. Alice might feel that this policy appropriately controls her exposure, but may feel differently if she learned that her boss was accessing her location every 5 minutes. In addition to specifying who has access to personal information, users need a way to quantify, interpret, and control the extent to which this data is shared. We propose and evaluate an intuitive mechanism for summarizing and controlling a user's exposure on smartphone-based platforms. Our approach uses the visual metaphor of eyes appearing and growing in size on the home screen; the rate at which these eyes grow depends on the number of accesses granted for a user's location, and the type of person (e.g., family vs. friend) making these accesses. This approach gives users an accurate and ambient sense of their exposure and helps them take actions to limit their exposure, all without explicitly identifying the social contacts making requests. Through two systematic user studies (N = 43,41) we show that our interface is indeed effective at summarizing complex exposure information and provides comparable information to a more cumbersome interface presenting more detailed information.