HCI Project Report: Culture, Identity, and App Genres in Mobile Application Permission Decisions
Published:
This report was the final deliverable for the semester-long group research project in my graduate-level Human-Computer Interaction class. Motivated by an understanding that privacy and security needs are informed by individual backgrounds, we sought to understand how these unique needs manifest in the context of mobile application permissions to hopefully guide inclusive app designs. We designed, distributed, analyzed, and presented the results of a study aimed at forming an understanding of how users’ gender, race and ethnicity, and nationality impact the permissions they allow to a mobile app, and to what degree they allowed these permissions. In addition, we explored how app genres interact with these demographic factors to affect permission-granting.
Distribution of data access granted to a hypothetical app via permissions, by app genre and nationality (represented by the continent a participant has resided in for most of their life, grouped into North America or International).
Abstract
Privacy and security are crucial functions in most user applications, especially smartphone apps. An individual’s privacy needs, concerns, and preferences can vary based on demographic factors as well as the type of application. Precise understanding of how age, race, ethnicity, nationality, and app genre plays a role in allowing those permissions is important for inclusive and diversity-oriented application and system designs. In this study, we conducted a survey to understand how demographic factors and app genre affect the data permissions users grant to an app. Our survey design includes a series of hypothetical scenarios involving different mobile app genres, where participants were instructed to indicate the permissions they would allow, to what degree they would allow them, and how they expected the app to use this information. We conducted a preliminary study to identify the most effective scenario description approach, which we later employed in our main survey design. Our main survey collected users’ demographic information, privacy and security preferences across different app genres, and their expectation on the collected app data usage. The demographics of our sample was diverse, with a total number of 81 participants in our study. We found race and ethnicity had significant effects on permission-granting, while age, gender and nationality did not. We also found that app genres had a pivotal role in privacy decisions of participants. Last, we discovered an interaction between nationality and app genre for permissions granted to an app. The findings of our study hold implications for more inclusive and privacy-focused mobile application designs.