Privacy Tipping Points in Smartphones Privacy Preferences

The aim of this research was to understand what affects people's privacy preferences in smartphone apps. We ran a four-week study in the wild with 34 participants. Participants were asked to answer questions, which were used to gather information about their personal context and to measure their privacy preferences, by varying app name and the purpose of data collection. Our results show that participants shared the most when no information about data access or purpose was given, and shared the least when both of these details were specified. When just one of either purpose or the requesting app was shown, participants shared less when just the purpose was specified than when just the app name was given. We found that the predominant factor affecting users' choices was the purpose for data access. In our study the purpose varied from being not specified, to vague, to being very specific. Participants were more willing to disclose data when no purpose was specified. When a vague purpose was shown, participants became more privacy-aware and were less willing to disclose their information. When specific purposes were shown, participants were more willing to disclose, provided the purpose for requesting the information appeared to be beneficial to them, while participants shared the least when the purpose for data access was solely beneficial to developers.