Indiana University Bloomington

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Technical Report TR742:
IoTMarketplace: Informing Purchase Decisions with Risk Communication

Shakthidhar Reddy Gopavaram, Jayati Dev, Sanchari Das, Jean Camp
(Aug 2019), 16 pages pages
Abstract:
It is common for people to declare that online privacy is important, to indicate that it is valuable, and to simultaneously behave in a manner inconsistent with these expressed preferences. This discrepancy between users' concerns and their behavior has been explained by three factors: information asymmetry, bounded rationality, and psychological biases. The conflict between expressions of concern and purchase decisions is amplified as the Internet of Things brings the potential for real-time multimedia surveillance, even at home. But there is not empirical evidence that privacy or security influence purchase decisions about IoT devices. In this work, we design an interface for an Internet of Things (IoT) Marketplace that enables participants to make more privacy aware purchases by addressing three of the factors that are associated with the privacy paradox. We then conduct a between subjects experiment to test the effect of the interaction on product selection. The results from this experiment show that when participants are presented with an interface that addresses all three factors, they purchase IoT devices that are more privacy preserving even if they have to pay a premium to do so. The results also show that when participants are presented only with privacy indicators they do not consistently make privacy-preserving device choices if the psychological biases affecting users' decision making are not also addressed by interaction design.

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