Negative Effects of Social Triggers on User Security and Privacy Behaviors

People make decisions while being influenced by those around them. Previous studies have shown that users often adopt security practices on the basis of advice from others and have proposed collaborative and community-based approaches to enhance user security behaviors. In this paper, we focused on the negative effects of social triggers and investigated whether risky user behaviors are socially triggered. We conducted an online survey to understand the triggers for risky user behaviors and the practices of sharing the behaviors. We found that a non-negligible percentage of participants experienced social triggers before engaging in risky behaviors. We also show that socially triggered risky behaviors are more likely to be socially shared, i.e., there are negative chains of risky behaviors. Our findings suggest that more efforts are needed to reduce negative social effects, and we propose specific approaches to accomplish this.