Understanding compliance to privacy guidelines using text-and video-based scenarios

Abstract

Privacy is a major concern for the design and user acceptance of pervasive technology. Investigating privacy poses several methodological challenges. A popular approach involves surveying reactions of people to scenarios that highlight privacy issues. This paper examines the validity of this approach. It reports an experiment that compared people's ability to correctly judge compliance to privacy principles when scenarios are presented in video versus textual form. It was found that such privacy-related concepts are hard to understand, leading to a large number of erroneous judgments regardless of medium and that interpretation varied across media. Comprehension in such studies can be improved, if a text scenario is preceded by a video-based version. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.