Towards an Engineering Model of Privacy-Related Decisions

People make numerous decisions that affect their own or others’ privacy, including the decisions to engage in certain activities, to reveal and share information or to allow access to information. These decisions depend on properties of the information to be revealed, the situation in which the decision is made, the possible recipients of the information, and characteristics of the individual person. System design should ideally protect users from unwanted consequences by allowing them to make informed decisions, at times blocking users’ ability to perform certain actions (e.g., when the user is a minor). The development of alerting and blocking mechanisms should be based on predictive models of user behavior, similar to engineering models in other domains. These models can be used to evaluate different design alternatives and to assess the required system specifications. Predictive models of privacy decisions will have to combine elements from normative decision making and from behavioral, descriptive research on decision making. Some major issues in the development and validation of such models are presented.