Exploration of a Mobile Design for a Privacy Assistant to Help Users in Sharing Content in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Currently available Online Social Network (OSN) solutions with which users can select the audience with whom they want to share online content have been shown to be inefficient in protecting their privacy. As a result, users may either censure themselves or post information about themselves that they may later regret. To address the shortcomings of existing solutions, we propose to rely on a privacy assistant that will help the users in their audience selection. Among the necessary steps for its design, we focus in this paper on the visible tip of the iceberg, i.e., the interface that will present the suggestion to the users. Our interface addresses our defined criteria and is dedicated to mobile devices. In this first design phase, we have implemented and evaluated our proposed solution with ten participants using System Usability Scale (SUS). We have reached a SUS score of 70.75 and found out that our proposed interface is usable and easy to understand.We finally discuss possible improvements and challenges for designing and evaluating such interfaces.