ANN ARBOR—We try to follow experts’ cybersecurity and privacy recommendations but quite often many of us do so halfway or we give up.
There are too many steps. The repetitious procedures get cumbersome. The trade-off of reduced access to information in exchange for a vague sense of security doesn’t seem worth it.
To find out why people adopt and then sometimes abandon online safety measures, researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information and NortonLifeLock’s Research Group surveyed more than 900 people about their use of 30 commonly recommended practices to guard against security, privacy, and identity theft risks.
Their study will appear April 26 in the Proceedings of the 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which has been canceled due to COVID-19 but will publish conference research. The U-M paper has been recognized with an Honorable Mention Award.