Mission Impossible Capturing rich yet natural user behaviour on the Web across locations and devices

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Mission Impossible? Capturing rich yet natural
user behaviour on the Web across locations and
devices
Kirstie Hawkey Faculty of Computer
Science Dalhousie University
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Capturing Normal Behaviour

• Often want to capture ALL browsing
• Environments vary between participants and for
  each participant
• Dont want to limit population
• Across different contexts
• Location, device, browsers
• Capture rich data
• Visited pages, browser interactions, users tasks
  or perceptions
• Want to maintain normal environment
• Browser with all settings and features intact
• Maintain the flow

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Tradeoffs
Implementation Costs
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Our Experiences
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Visual Privacy in Web Browsers
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Study 1 Goals

• Examine participants perception of the privacy
  of their normal web browsing activity
• Explore patterns in application of privacy levels
• Introduced 4-tier privacy scheme

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Study 1 Challenges

• Needed to capture normal web browsing
  activities to see if patterns exist
• Normal in terms of environment
• Usual browser
• Fully functional features
• Normal in terms of flow
• Not interrupt activity with privacy annotations
• Normal in terms of visited pages
• Guard privacy

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Study 1 Methodology

• Week-long field study
• 20 laptop users
• Browser helper object
• Electronic diary
• Received sanitized data

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Study 2 Goals

• How does context (location of browsing, content
  of page) affect participants privacy
  classifications?
• Do the findings from the first field study extend
  to a broader participant base?
• PG1 laptop users (primarily technical)
• PG2 varied device
• 10 desktop users (technical/non-technical)
• 5 laptop users (non-technical)

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Study 2 Additional Challenges

• Install on a greater variety of devices
• Maintain privacy even though receiving data about
  visited page
• Record location without breaking flow

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Study 2 Methodology

• Week-long field study
• Installed browser helper object
• Additional context
• Electronic diary
• Selectively sanitized data

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Richness of Data?

• BHO limited the data that could be collected
• Browser window ID, visited pages, basic
  navigation events
• Document focus events (barely), not window level
• Needed to be installed on each computer
• Sample population limited to IE users, Windows
  computer

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Normal Environment?

• Browser environment intact
• Logging transparent to users
• Normal browser with all features intact
• Did not have to remember to turn on
• Flow
• Location captured automatically or on window
  close
• Annotations at end of day
• Evidence of socially undesirable browsing
  activities