Understanding Privacy Attitudes and Concerns Towards Remote Communications During the COVID-19 Pandemic

06/09/2021
by   Pardis Emami-Naeini, et al.
0

Since December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused people around the world to exercise social distancing, which has led to an abrupt rise in the adoption of remote communications for working, socializing, and learning from home. As remote communications will outlast the pandemic, it is crucial to protect users' security and respect their privacy in this unprecedented setting, and that requires a thorough understanding of their behaviors, attitudes, and concerns toward various aspects of remote communications. To this end, we conducted an online study with 220 worldwide Prolific participants. We found that privacy and security are among the most frequently mentioned factors impacting participants' attitude and comfort level with conferencing tools and meeting locations. Open-ended responses revealed that most participants lacked autonomy when choosing conferencing tools or using microphone/webcam in their remote meetings, which in several cases contradicted their personal privacy and security preferences. Based on our findings, we distill several recommendations on how employers, educators, and tool developers can inform and empower users to make privacy-protective decisions when engaging in remote communications.

READ FULL TEXT

page 5

page 8

page 9

research
07/08/2021

Remote Working Pre- and Post-COVID-19: An Analysis of New Threats and Risks to Security and Privacy

COVID-19 has radically changed society as we know it. To reduce the spre...
research
01/23/2021

An In-depth Review of Privacy Concerns Raised by the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 has hugely changed our lives, work, and interactions with peopl...
research
06/10/2021

Examining the Examiners: Students' Privacy and Security Perceptions of Online Proctoring Services

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, educational institutions quickly t...
research
04/01/2021

Dynamic Silos: Modularity in intra-organizational communication networks before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

Workplace communications around the world were drastically altered by Co...
research
05/06/2022

Watching the watchers: bias and vulnerability in remote proctoring software

Educators are rapidly switching to remote proctoring and examination sof...
research
05/28/2021

Assessing the intelligibility of vocoded speech using a remote testing framework

Over the past year, remote speech intelligibility testing has become a p...
research
06/11/2020

2020 UK Lockdown Cyber Narratives: the Secure, the Insecure and the Worrying

On the 23rd March 2020, the UK entered a period of lockdown in the face ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset