Users' perspective on designing inclusive privacy-enhancing indicators

With the advent of Internet technologies, information privacy has emerged as an important but complicated notion that is difficult to articulate and conceptualize in technological system design. In this study we identify the key baseline factors for designing privacy-enhancing systems from users' perspective. Utilizing Solove's pragmatic approach to investigate global users' conceptualization of information privacy, we identify two indicators that pertain to information privacy: users' need for information control (NIC) and their perceived risks of information misuse (PRIM). We also examined social influences on these indicators, including region, age, and gender. Our results show that users from different regions of the world consider “the ability to stop unauthorized access” as their foremost priority for information control, while they report “the invasion of personal private sphere” as the highest risk for information misuse. We also found that social factors greatly impact these two indicators. For instance, users from different regions exhibit different needs for information control and perceive risks differently. Based on users' NIC and PRIM as well as regional and generational differences, we propose several user-centered design directions for system developers and policy makers to advance privacy-enhancing systems globally.