Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

If This Context Then That Concern: Exploring users’ concerns with IFTTT applets

If This Context Then That Concern: Exploring users’ concerns with IFTTT applets AbstractEnd users are increasingly using trigger-action platforms like If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) to create applets to connect smart-home devices and services. However, there are inherent implicit risks in using such applets—even non-malicious ones—as sensitive information may leak through their use in certain contexts (e.g., where the device is located, who can observe the resultant action). This work aims to understand to what extent end users can assess this implicit risk. More importantly we explore whether usage context makes a difference in end-users’ perception of such risks. Our work complements prior work that has identified the impact of usage context on expert evaluation of risks in IFTTT by focusing the impact of usage context on end-users’ risk perception. Through a Mechanical Turk survey of 386 participants on 49 smart-home IFTTT applets, we found that participants have a nuanced view of contextual factors and that different values for contextual factors impact end-users’ risk perception differently. Further, our findings show that nudging the participants to think about different usage contexts led them to think deeper about the associated risks and raise their concern scores. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies de Gruyter

If This Context Then That Concern: Exploring users’ concerns with IFTTT applets

Download PDF
21 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/if-this-context-then-that-concern-exploring-users-concerns-with-ifttt-JIDRef0l5G
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Mahsa Saeidi et al., published by Sciendo
ISSN
2299-0984
eISSN
2299-0984
DOI
10.2478/popets-2022-0009
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractEnd users are increasingly using trigger-action platforms like If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) to create applets to connect smart-home devices and services. However, there are inherent implicit risks in using such applets—even non-malicious ones—as sensitive information may leak through their use in certain contexts (e.g., where the device is located, who can observe the resultant action). This work aims to understand to what extent end users can assess this implicit risk. More importantly we explore whether usage context makes a difference in end-users’ perception of such risks. Our work complements prior work that has identified the impact of usage context on expert evaluation of risks in IFTTT by focusing the impact of usage context on end-users’ risk perception. Through a Mechanical Turk survey of 386 participants on 49 smart-home IFTTT applets, we found that participants have a nuanced view of contextual factors and that different values for contextual factors impact end-users’ risk perception differently. Further, our findings show that nudging the participants to think about different usage contexts led them to think deeper about the associated risks and raise their concern scores.

Journal

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies – de Gruyter

Published: Jan 1, 2022

Keywords: Privacy; IoT; Smart home; IFTTT applets; Contextual factors

There are no references for this article.