Perceived vs. Actual Understanding of Privacy Information

Aufgabenstellung / Topic

Measuring whether people actually understand the privacy information that is presented to them is difficult. Asking ''Did you understand this?'' often only yields a self report of their perceived understanding. A discrepancy between perceived and actual understanding can contribute to privacy risks. You would work on developing a method that captures the actual understanding of users and use the method in a user study where you test different privacy information interfaces.
Focus: Study Design, smaller implementation part.

You will:

• Review literature on how to measure understanding and privacy interface design.
• Develop a method for measuring users understanding of privacy information
• Design and implement different interfaces/presentation variants
• Conduct a user study to evaluate the different interfaces using the measuring method you developed
• Analyze the interfaces e.g. in regards to how well users understood the information presented to them, usability of the different interfaces,...
• Evaluate/reflect how well your developed measuring method worked
• Summarize findings in a thesis and (optionally) contribute to a research publication
• Present your work in the Disputationsseminar of Prof. Dr. Florian Alt

You need:

• Interest in usable privacy, HCI and empirical methods
• Programming skills
• Interest to conduct user studies with careful selection of methods to capture user privacy behavior
• Interest in learning about empirical research methods, e.g. scale development

If you are interested in this topic, please contact me via email and include your CV, academic transcript, intended start date and 1-2 sentences why you are interested in the topic.