Challenges of Usable Privacy

A thorough understanding of usable privacy research challenges is essential for ensuring high-quality research, improving methods and avoiding repeating mistakes, identifying research gap fillers, and advancing the field. In this chapter, we will examine some of the challenges associated with conducting usable privacy studies, such as the challenges of encompassing a variety of users, conflicting privacy and usability goals, privacy as a secondary objective, the privacy paradox, and issues related to measuring the right thing, the difficulty of conducting ecologically valid studies, and ethical and legal issues such as ethics of nudge and deception when conducting this type of research. We will further discuss the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges related to privacy technologies including the challenge of educating users on how privacy-enhancing technologies work and how to make online privacy transparent considering the effects of different factors such as information level, time, and medium through which we communicate to users that all play an important role in determining the effectiveness of transparency in protecting users’ privacy. This chapter concludes by discussing some specific HCI challenges associated with privacy laws, such as discrepancies between what privacy laws require and what users need and problems regarding notice and choice.