Research Brief: Bring clarity to the threats that people perceive to their privacy and their understanding of available privacy tools and generate recommendations for high-value privacy-related features to guide product strategy.
Methods: Diary study, In-depth interviews, Affinity diagramming, Surveys, Focus groups.
What Privacy Threats Do People Actually Care About?
One of the big questions that the research was trying to address was whether people actually cared enough about privacy to make privacy features a competitive advantage. In countless publically-available research surveys, a large percentage of people expressed concern about privacy, but in reality very few people took concrete measures to protect their privacy using appropriate tools. What explains this gap?
To answer this question, I conducted a series of studies and activities that built on each other.
This research approach led to the following key insights that have influenced Firefox’s privacy-centric product strategy.
#1 - Identity Theft is the Threat That People Fear Most
“I use private browsing mode when doing any online banking. I think it’s something that protects my privacy, but I’m not sure if it actually works. Who knows?”
Firefox Monitor
Two-thirds of the survey respondents rated identity theft as the threat that they were most concerned about online. Despite how prevalent this threat is, however, we found that participants in the research weren’t particularly clear about what could be done about it. They either did not know what they could do, or else they turned to ineffective tools, such as anti-virus tools and private browsing mode, and hoped for the best. Because of this, we saw an opportunity to send a much clearer message about how people could protect themselves. The subsequent work on Firefox Monitor that I conducted stemmed from this.
#2 - Attitudes to Online Advertising are Nuanced and So Ad-Filtering and Ad-Blocking Policy Needs to Be As Well
“If ads come up it’s not a big deal - it’s more that I’m worried about the data being passed on. I just don’t like the idea of large companies building a database with me at the center of it.”
Image from vice.com
The participants we spoke to were in general not opposed to online advertising as a whole. Online advertising could be valuable in making them aware of products and services that they would not have heard of and many of them were aware of the role that advertising had in making online content free and in supporting small publishers. The majority of participants we spoke to were not, therefore, in favor of an outright block on online advertising.
Nevertheless, people did object to online ads either when they interrupted what they were doing, or if they broke certain social norms around privacy. In particular, they objected to ads if it was clear that they used information that was collected from a different website - retargeted ads were a good example of this. This was akin to being talked to behind your back. Furthermore, participants could feel uncomfortable if it was clear that an ad made an inference about them when they did not willingly provide that information themselves - e.g., if an ad labeled someone as “single”, “depressed”, etc.
These insights informed the development of Firefox’s anti-tracking policies - in particular, to block cross-site tracking cookies and social media trackers by default.