Understanding User Prioritization and Comprehension of Smartphone Permissions

DOI

Smartphones allow users to control the sharing of their data with apps according to their privacy preferences. Yet, users struggle to enact their privacy preferences via the available permission settings. To understand whether these difficulties result from inaccurate understanding and/or suboptimal interface design of the permissions manager, we designed and administered an online questionnaire to smartphone users from the United States (n = 151). We asked the participants to rate and rank the importance of the permissions commonly available on smartphones and to describe their understanding of what each setting controls. We found that a majority of users deem some permissions as important or unimportant, with the importance of other permissions varying across users based on use and privacy concerns. Our findings indicate that users misunderstand several permissions and express unfamiliarity with how some of them operate. We apply the insight from our study to derive suggestions to enhance smartphone permission managers by promoting personalized and efficient user interaction and more accurate user comprehension of functional operation.