Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Predicting Privacy Attitudes Using Phone Metadata

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling (SBP-BRiMS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9708))

Abstract

With the increasing usage of smartphones, there is a corresponding increase in the phone metadata generated by individuals using these devices. Managing the privacy of personal information on these devices can be a complex task. Recent research has suggested the use of social and behavioral data for automatically recommending privacy settings. This paper is the first effort to connect users’ phone use metadata with their privacy attitudes. Based on a 10-week long field study involving phone metadata collection via an app, and a survey on privacy attitudes, we report that an analysis of cell phone metadata may reveal vital clues to a person’s privacy attitudes. Specifically, a predictive model based on phone usage metadata significantly outperforms a comparable personality features-based model in predicting individual privacy attitudes. The results motivate a newer direction of automatically inferring a user’s privacy attitudes by looking at their phone usage characteristics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Acquisti, A., Gross, R.: Imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook. In: Danezis, G., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2006. LNCS, vol. 4258, pp. 36–58. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Acquisti, A., Grossklags, J.: Privacy attitudes and privacy behavior. In: Camp, L.J., Lewis, S. (eds.) Economics of Information Security. Advances in Information Security, vol. 12, pp. 165–178. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Beale, R.: Supporting social interaction with smart phones. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 4(2), 35–41 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bourdieu, P., Wacquant, L.: Classification struggles and the dialectic of social and mental structures. In: An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 14. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Boyd, D.: Friends, friendsters, and myspace top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Boyd, D., Ellison, N.: Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. J. Comput.-Mediated Commun. 13(1), 210–230 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Buchanan, T., Paine, C., Joinson, A.N.: Internet Privacy Scales. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Burke, M., Kraut, R., Marlow, C.: Social capital on Facebook: Differentiating uses and users. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2011. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Chawla, N.V.: Data mining for imbalanced datasets: An overview. In: Maimon, O., Rokach, L. (eds.) Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Handbook, pp. 853–867. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Coleman, J.: Social capital in the creation of human capital. In: Knowledge and Social Capital, vol. 94, pp. 17–41 (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Donath, J., Boyd, D.: Public displays of connection. BT Technol. J. 22(4), 71–82 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S.R., Passerini, K.: Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: a comparison of Facebook and MySpace. In: Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems AIS 2007, Keystone (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., Lampe, C.: The benefits of Facebook “friends”: exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital. J. Comput. Mediated Commun. 12, 1143–1168 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Egelman, S., Oates, A., Krishnamurthi, S.: Oops, I did it again: mitigating repeated access control errors on facebook. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2295–2304. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Fang, L., LeFevre, K.: Privacy wizards for social networking sites. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 351–360 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Fogel, J., Nehmad, E.: Internet social network communities: Risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns. Comput. Hum. Behav. 25(1), 153–160 (2009). doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.08.006

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Hang, A., Von Zezschwitz, E., De Luca, A., Hussmann, H.: Too much information! User attitudes towards smartphone sharing (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Introna, L., Pouloudi, A.: Privacy in the information age: Stakeholders, interests and values. J. Bus. Ethics 22(1), 27–38 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Junglas, I.A., Johnson, N.A., Spitzmüller, C.: Personality traits and concern for privacy: an empirical study in the context of location-based services. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 17(4), 387–402 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. John, O.P., Naumann, L.P., Soto, C.J.: Paradigm shift to the integrative big five trait taxonomy. In: Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 3rd edn., pp. 114–158 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Karlson, A., Brush, A., Schcchter, S.: Can I borrow your phone?: understanding concerns when sharing mobile phones. In: CHI, pp. 1647–1650 (2009). doi:10.1145/1518701.1518953

  22. Nordichi 2012: Making sense through design. In: Proceedings Of The 7th Nordic Conference On Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 284–287. doi:10.1145/2399016.2399061

  23. Reeder, R.W., Karat, C.-M., Karat, J., Brodie, C.: Usability challenges in security and privacy policy-authoring interfaces. In: Baranauskas, C., Abascal, J., Barbosa, S.D.J. (eds.) INTERACT 2007. LNCS, vol. 4663, pp. 141–155. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  24. Schlegel, R., Kapadia, A., Lee, A.: Eyeing your exposure: Quantifying and controlling information sharing for improved privacy. In: Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, SOUPS 2011 (2011). doi:10.1145/2078827.2078846

  25. Squicciarini, A.C., Sundareswaran, S., Lin, D., Wede, J.: A3P: adaptive policy prediction for shared images over popular content sharing sites. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, pp. 261–270. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Steinfield, C., Ellison, N.B., Lampe, C.: Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: A longitudinal analysis. J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 29(2008), 434–445 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Stutzman, F.: An evaluation of identity-sharing behavior in social network communities. Int. Digit. Media Arts J. 3(1), 10–18 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Rosenbaum, B.L.: Attitude toward invasion of privacy in the personnel selection process and job applicant demographic and personality correlates. J. Appl. Psychol. 58(3), 333–338 (1973)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Tufekci, Z.: Can you see me now? Audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites. Bull. Sci. Technol. Stud. 11, 544–564 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Wang, Z., Liu, Y.: Identifying key factors affecting information disclosure intention in online shopping. Int. J. Smart Home 8(4), 47–58 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Watson, J., Besmer, A., Lipford, H.R.: + Your circles: sharing behavior on Google+ . In: Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, p. 12. ACM, July 2012

    Google Scholar 

  32. Westin, A.F.: Privacy and freedom. Wash. Lee Law Rev. 25(1), 166 (1968)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Westin, A., Harris Louis & Associates: Harris-Equifax Consumer Privacy Survey (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Westin, A., Harris Louis & Associates: Equifax-Harris Consumer Privacy Survey (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Westin, A., Harris Louis & Associates: E-Commerce & Privacy: What Net Users Want 1998

    Google Scholar 

  36. Westin, A.: Freebies and Privacy: What Net Users Think (1999) http://www.pandab.org/sr990714.html

  37. Westin, A., Harris Interactive: IBM-Harris Multi-National Consumer Privacy Survey (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Westin, A.: Consumer, Privacy and Survey Research (2003). http://www.harrisinteractive.com/advantages/pubs/DNC_AlanWestinConsumersPrivacyandSurveyResearch.pdf

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Cecilia Gal, Padampriya Subramnian, Ariana Blake, Suril Dalal, Sneha Dasari, and Christin Jose, for help with conducting the study and processing the data.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA

    Isha Ghosh & Vivek K. Singh

Authors
  1. Isha Ghosh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Vivek K. Singh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vivek K. Singh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA

    Kevin S. Xu

  2. Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    David Reitter

  3. Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Dongwon Lee

  4. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Nathaniel Osgood

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Ghosh, I., Singh, V.K. (2016). Predicting Privacy Attitudes Using Phone Metadata. In: Xu, K., Reitter, D., Lee, D., Osgood, N. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9708. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39930-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39931-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation