The Impact of UI on Privacy Awareness - Connecting Online Polls and Social Media

Online polls are considered a valuable method of collecting users’ opinions, attitudes and preferences. They also help to increase user engagement, which is a goal of many online publishers, as they seek to understand their target audiences better and therefore want to collect and analyze user data. Gaining access to information from their users’ social network accounts is seen as a significant advance and consequently social login functionality is becoming an increasingly common feature of various web applications. Users appreciate the convenience and benefits of this, but are often unaware of the privacy issues that arise. This study investigated the influence of different types of privacy alert on users’ deci- sions whether to connect an online polling application to a social network, thereby granting access to their social media data in exchange for seeing their friends’ votes. The method used live data from real polls in German- speaking countries and gives insights into user behavior when confronted with requests for Facebook data. Differences in privacy awareness and user decisions between our research and previous studies in laboratory settings are addressed as well.