Agnieszka Kitkowska

Understading How Visual Cues affect Online Privacy Decisions  

Abstract: People make increasing numbers of privacy decisions during everyday online interactions, and visual elements of user interface design often influence their choices. Hence, it is in the hands of choice architects and designers to guide users towards specific decision outcomes. Such "nudging" gained much interest among scholars from interdisciplinary research, resulting in experimental studies investigating visual cues that may alter people's online attitudes and behaviors. Attitude and behavior changes can be attributed to several psychological effects manifesting in cognitive processing and decision-making. This short talk presents findings from the systematic literature review and selected experimental study results investigating various psychological factors active during online privacy interactions. It focuses on the visual cues triggering different psychological effects and their capabilities to alter privacy attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, this talk presents visual cues' division into two categories: privacy-enhancing and privacy-deteriorating, and discusses their potential practical implications.