Negotiation as an Interaction Mechanism for Deciding App Permissions

On the Android platform, apps make use of personal data as part of their business model, trading location, contacts, photos and more for app use. Few people are particularly aware of the permission settings or make changes to them. We hypothesize that both the difficulty in checking permission settings for all apps on a device, along with the lack of flexibility in deciding what happens to one's data, makes the perceived cost to protect one's privacy too high. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of a study that explores what happens when permission settings are more discretional at install time. We present the results of a pilot experiment, in which we ask users to negotiate which data they are happy to share, and we show that this results in higher user satisfaction than the typical take-it-or-leave-it setting. Our preliminary findings suggest negotiating consent is a powerful interaction mechanism that engages users and can enable them to strike a balance between privacy and pricing concerns.