Oikos: Study Design
Content
Approach
For each of the aforementioned categories and their related products, we studied their privacy policies to understand the information collected by the respective devices, at the same time, also realizing if the data collected is in line with the product category. We also looked for possible vulnerabilities in their policies, which might compromise the user’s identity in some scenarios.
Additionally, we created a user study covering the various aspects of the policies and how the data collected could be used by brands for their businesses. The user study included user awareness and acceptance of data sharing and storage practices, anonymization steps, sensitive data encryption measures, and transmission security. We also analyzed how easy it is for users to be able to modify or opt-out of these
Study Design
We designed a Google survey that helped us collect the relevant data that we needed to perform the user study. We asked the participant for their desired products and presented the questions accordingly. For each product, we asked the participant what they think about the prod- uct’s privacy options and implications. Once the participant has answered the questions, we present the participant with the infor- mation from each of the privacy policies. We ask whether knowing the privacy concerns (if any) changes their perspective about the product and consequently change their decision to own/not own a product. At the end of the survey, about 44 people had responded. We hypothesized that once the user is aware of the privacy implications regarding any particular product, their decision would change from their initial assumption.
In total, we received 51 responses, including the people who reviewed multiple categories counted separately. 58.8% being for Apple Watch, 15.6% being for Snapchat Glasses, and the remainder for Levi’s Tucker Smart Jacket. Each category was reviewed by different people, in general, and hence needed to be reviewed as so.