How to protect my privacy? - classifying end-user information privacy protection behaviors

Abstract

The Internet and smart devices pose many risks at users’ information privacy. Individuals are aware of that and try to counter tracking activities by applying different privacy protection behaviors. These are manifold and differ in scope, goal and degree of technology utilization. Although there is a lot of literature which investigates protection strategies, it is lacking holistic user-centric classifications. We review literature and identify 141 privacy protection behaviors end-users show. We map these results to 38 distinct categories and apply hybrid cart sorting to create a taxonomy, which we call the “End-User Information Privacy Protection Behavior Model” (EIPPBM).