The increased popularity of interconnected devices, which we rely on when performing day-to-day activities expose people to various privacy harms. This paper presents findings from the empirical investigation of privacy concerns. The study revealed that people, regardless of their diversity, perceive privacy harms as generic and simplified models, not individually as suggested in Solove’s framework. Additionally, the results identified differences in privacy concerns related to information disclosure, protection behavior, and demographics. The findings may benefit privacy and system designers, ensuring that policies and digital systems match people’s privacy expectations, decreasing risks and harms.

Because of the increasing dependency on online technologies in even the most ordinary activities, people have to make privacy decisions during everyday online interactions. Visual design often influences their choices. Hence, it is in the hands of choice architects and designers to guide users towards specific decision outcomes. This “nudging” has gained much interest among scholars in interdisciplinary research, resulting in experimental studies with visual cues that may have the potential to alter attitudes and behaviors. Attitude and behavior changes are often attributed to several psychological effects manifesting in cognitive processing and decision-making. This article presents the results of a systematic literature review carried out to identify which psychological effects have been previously studied in the context of online privacy interactions. Subsequently, fifteen articles were selected and thoroughly reviewed, resulting in the identification of twenty psychological effects. The visual cues triggering these effects were recognized and classified against their capabilities to alter privacy attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, the visual cues were divided into two categories: privacy-enhancing and privacy-deteriorating. This review discusses the applicability of such cues in research and UI design. Further, the findings are discussed against the existing research on digital nudges. The authors conclude with a discussion on issues of research quality in the privacy-related field and outline the road to improvement.

The study was run to investigate exploratory capabilities of factors such as individual characteristics, privacy concerns and information disclosure in the context of privacy behaviors. The research examined whether affective states arising from immediate emotions alter such capabilities. The results of an online study with 474 international participants demonstrate that immediate emotions might influence information sharing. The effect of privacy concerns, personality and information disclosure on the willingness to share is stronger when participants are in a neutral affective state. However, when the positive or negative feelings take over, the influence of these factors on willingness to share decreases. In this article, we postulate the necessity to include immediate emotions into research on privacy-related decision-making and discuss the applicability of our results in the context of privacy UIs.

We all too often must consent to information collection at an early stage of digital interactions, during application sign-up. Paying low attention to privacy policies, we are rarely aware of processing practices. Drawing on multidisciplinary research, we postulate that privacy policies presenting information in a way that triggers affective responses, together with individual characteristics, may influence privacy attitudes. Through an online quasi-experiment (N=88), we investigate how affect, illustration type, personality, and privacy concerns may influence end-users' willingness to disclose information and privacy awareness. Our results partially confirm these assumptions. We found that the affect may have an impact on privacy awareness, and stable psychological factors may influence disclosures. We discuss the applicability of our findings in interface design and in future research.

When people sign-up to new online services, privacy notices are the initial means by which data handling practices are communicated. Yet, their design seldom ensures users' privacy comprehension or provides people with privacy choices, resulting in negative feelings associated with the sign-up process. In this paper, we investigate how to improve privacy notice design to enhance privacy comprehension and control, while inducing more positive feelings towards these notices. In an online experiment (N=620), we examine the factors of curiosity, privacy concerns, trust, and time. We study how these factors and visual designs of notices (framing and control) influence privacy comprehension, intention to disclose, and affect (negative-positive). Our results show that, depending on an individual's level of curiosity, control can influence privacy comprehension, disclosure, and affect. We demonstrate that affect moderates the relationship between privacy concerns and disclosure. We elaborate on our results, highlighting how privacy notices that activate curiosity and provide control, could enhance usability and strengthen privacy-conscious behaviors.

As people's offline and online lives become increasingly entwined, the sensitivity of personal information disclosed online is increasing. Disclosures often occur through structured disclosure fields (e.g., drop-down lists). Prior research suggests these fields may limit privacy, with non-disclosing users being presumed to be hiding undesirable information. We investigated this around HIV status disclosure in online dating apps used by men who have sex with men. Our online study asked participants (N=183) to rate profiles where HIV status was either disclosed or undisclosed. We tested three designs for displaying undisclosed fields. Visibility of undisclosed fields had a significant effect on the way profiles were rated, and other profile information (e.g., ethnicity) could affect inferences that develop around undisclosed information. Our research highlights complexities around designing for non-disclosure and questions the voluntary nature of these fields. Further work is outlined to ensure disclosure control is appropriately implemented around online sensitive information disclosures. 

People manage their online personas similarly to the real life ones - by sharing favorable, rather than unfavorable, information about themselves. Nevertheless, the sharing of unfavorable information may still occur (e.g., negative reviews) and influence others' perceptions. Also, it remains unclear why people reveal potentially damaging information, particularly in the context of online sharing economies. In this paper, we report on a controlled online experiment (N=462), which explored how individual characteristics and feedback properties influence online sharing of information in two contexts (travel and short-term employment) where personal ratings are essential. We provided users with the option to conceal their personal rating if it dropped below a certain threshold. We found that the context of the interaction was the main determinant of the threshold users chose. Feedback participants received (with different control availability) either before or after they made their choices could trigger additional considerations. However, users relied on their priors (e.g., experience, assumptions), rather than on new information provided in indications. Our findings show how people often fail to identify the impact of non-disclosure, which can lead to undesirable information being signaled to other users. These findings challenge the notion of user "informedness'' vis-a-vis personal information disclosure.