Influence of Privacy Attitude and Privacy Cue Framing on Android App Choices

Transmission of personally identifiable information from smartphone apps has become ubiquitous as smartphones themselves. Privacy controls currently provided in the form of permissions warnings falls insufficient especially for communicating risk during app installation. Presenting easy to understand privacy risk icons/cues would help people make low risk app choices. However, the human factor requirements for designing such privacy risk icons are largely unknown. Towards this, we conducted a user experiment with 480 participants who made a series of app choices with/without privacy priming and with/without privacy risk communicating icons. Overall, presenting risk communicating icons along with app benefit icons has a significant effect on user app choices in terms of risk-benefit trade-off. We found that one type of privacy icon framing leads to mediocre app choices under particular conditions. We found that priming for privacy would lead to increased concern while choosing apps but may not have an augmenting effect on final app choices when combined with certain type of privacy framing. Based on our findings, we conclude with human factor recommendations for designing privacy risk communicating icons.