Because we care: Privacy Dashboard on Firefox OS

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Privacy Dashboard for Firefox OS, a user-centric privacy tool with features like remote protection and permission control, validated through user studies to enhance privacy usability.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel privacy dashboard for Firefox OS, integrating multiple privacy features and demonstrating its effectiveness through user studies.

Findings

Users value privacy features that balance usability and protection.

Educational aspects influence user privacy decisions.

User-centric design reduces privacy protection and usability gap.

Abstract

In this paper we present the Privacy Dashboard -- a tool designed to inform and empower the people using mobile devices, by introducing features such as Remote Privacy Protection, Backup, Adjustable Location Accuracy, Permission Control and Secondary-User Mode. We have implemented our solution on FirefoxOS and conducted user studies to verify the usefulness and usability of our tool. The paper starts with a discussion of different aspects of mobile privacy, how users perceive it and how much they are willing to give up for better usability. Then we describe the tool in detail, presenting what incentives drove us to certain design decisions. During our studies we tried to understand how users interact with the system and what are their priorities. We have verified our hypothesis, and the impact of the educational aspects on the decisions about the privacy settings. We show that by taking a user-centric development of privacy extensions we can reduce the gap between protection and usability.