When Forcing Collaboration is the Most Sensible Choice: Desirability of Precautionary and Dissuasive Mechanisms to Manage Multiparty Privacy Conflicts

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Individuals share increasing amounts of personal multimedia data, exposing themselves (uploaders) as well as others (data subjects). Non-consensual sharing of multimedia data that depicts others raises so-called multiparty privacy conflicts (MPCs), which can have severe consequences. To limit the incidence of MPCs, a family of Precautionary mechanisms have recently been developed that force uploaders to collaborate with the other data subjects to prevent MPCs. However, there is still very little work on understanding how users perceive the Precautionary mechanisms together with which ones they prefer and why. In addition, Precautionary mechanisms have some limitations, e.g., they require linking content to the co-owners’ identity. Therefore, we also explore alternatives to Precautionary mechanisms and propose a new class of solutions—Dissuasive mechanisms—that aim at deterring the uploaders from sharing without consent. We then present a user-centric comparison of Precautionary and Dissuasive mechanisms, through a large-scale survey (𝑁 = 1792). Our results showed that respondents prefer Precautionary to Dissuasive mechanisms. These enforce collaboration, provide more control to the data subjects, but also they reduce uploaders’ uncertainty around what is considered appropriate for sharing. We learned that threatening legal consequences is the most desirable Dissuasive mechanism, and that respondents prefer the mechanisms that threaten users with immediate consequences (compared with delayed consequences). Dissuasive mechanisms are in fact well received by frequent sharers and older users, while Precautionary mechanisms are preferred by women and younger users. We discuss the implications for design, including considerations about side leakages, consent collection, and censorship.