Timing Is Everything? The Effects of Timing and Placement of Online Privacy Indicators

This article was designed to study Internet privacy concerns for people buying items or even surfing different websites. The study was geared towards discovering if internet users were more likely to visit sites and purchase items from them when privacy indicators are made more prevalent and present at certain times. This study goes into a new P3P system sort of like the P2P networks that some are already familiar with. When a user searches for something the site returns results with red or green birds to determine the privacy of each site. The the red birds indicate that a site has conflicts with the users privacy concerns i.e. information gathering or spam sites, where as the green birds indicate that a site conforms with the users privacy concerns. This is similar to if a user has an anti-virus platform that restricts a user from opening phishing sites or even rejecting and blocking malicious sites/cookies that could cause harm or lead to private user data being taken.

I believe this sort of technology to be superflous in the fact that we already have programs that can block said sites and other such malicious materials. I however do like the fact that this information is integrated right into the search engine so a user does not have to attempt to go to a site first before they are rejected by there current malicious code blocking programs.


This article written by: Serge Egelman, Janice Tsai, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti