LERSSE paper titled “Is Implicit Authentication on Smartphones Really Popular? On Android Users’ Perception of Smart Lock for Android” has been accepted for publication at the Twenty-Second International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2020). The paper will be presented at the virtual conference holding later in the year.
Abstract of the paper: Implicit authentication (IA) on smartphones has gained a lot of attention from the research community over the past decade. IA leverages behavioral and contextual data to identify users without requiring explicit input, and thus can alleviate the burden of smartphone unlocking. The reported studies on users’ perception of IA have painted a very positive picture, showing that more than 60% of their respective participants are interested in adopting IA, should it become available on their devices. These studies, however, have all been done either in lab environments, or with low- to medium-fidelity prototypes, which limits their generalizability and ecological validity. Therefore, the question of “how would smartphone users perceive a commercialized IA scheme in a realistic setting?” remains unanswered. To bridge this knowledge gap, we report on the findings of our qualitative user study (N = 26) and our online survey (N = 343) to understand how Android users perceive Smart Lock (SL). SL is the first and currently only widely-deployed IA scheme for smartphones. We found that SL is not a widely adopted technology, even among those who have an SL-enabled phone and are aware of the existence of the feature. Conversely, we found unclear usefulness, and perceived lack of security, among others, to be major adoption barriers that caused the SL adoption rate to be as low as 13%. To provide a theoretical framework for explaining SL adoption, we propose an extended version of the technology acceptance model (TAM), called SL-TAM, which sheds light on the importance of factors such as perceived security and utility on SL adoption.
LERSSE paper titled “Towards Understanding Privacy and Trust in Online Reporting of Sexual Assault” has been accepted for 
publication at the Sixteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2020. The paper will be presented at the conference holding later in the year.
LERSSE paper “The Burden of Ending Online Account Sharing” has been accepted at CHI 2020.
The abstract of the paper reads: Many people share online accounts, even in situations where high privacy and security are expected. Naturally, the sharing of these accounts does not endure forever. This paper reports the privacy and security challenges that people experience when they stop online account sharing. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 participants who stopped sharing at least one online account in the 12 months preceding the study. Our results suggest that users experience cognitive and psychosocial burdens when ending account sharing. We offer suggestions for how to improve the design of online accounts to support users better when they end account sharing. Read the full paper here.
LERSSE paper “Amazon vs. My Brother: How Users of Shared Smart Speakers Perceive and Cope with Privacy Risks” (top 5% of submissions) has received an Honourable Mention award at CHI 2020.
With the rapid adoption of smart speakers in people’s homes, there is a corresponding increase in users’ privacy and security concerns. In contrast to previous studies of users’ concerns about smart speakers’ divulging private information to their manufacturers, our study focused on investigating users’ concerns with regard to housemates and external entities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 participants living in 21 households. Our results suggest that users often have an inadequate understanding of what data their smart speakers makes available to all users and what is kept private. Although participants expressed different privacy concerns about their housemates and external entities, they adopted similar, yet suboptimal, risk management strategies. We provide recommendations for future speaker design to support more optimal coping with the perceived risks. For more details, please check the paper.
At LERSSE, we enjoy being active just as much as we do enjoy research. As a way to experience the snow and the mountains in 2020, LERSSE members and their significant others made the trip to Cypress Mountain for a snowshoeing trip.
Continue reading “LERSSE Goes Snowshoeing on Cypress Mountain”
