Deliverable D3.1 “Report on user and societal aspects, and on usability of security and privacy OSN systems”

The overall aim of ENCASE is to leverage recent advancements in the field of usable security and privacy in order to design and implement a browser-based user-centric architecture for the protection of minors from malicious actors in online social networks. This architecture comprises three distinct browser-add-ons [1].

This deliverable, D3.1 “Report on user and societal aspects, and on usability of security and privacyOSN systems”, refers to the activities that were carried out as part of task 3.1 and task 3.2 of the work package 3 (WP3) of the ENCASE project. The purpose of task 3.1 was to identify the user requirements for security and privacy in Online Social Networks (OSNs). The purpose of task 3.2 was to study ways to improve user experience and user behavior when faced with security and privacy risks. The usability and user-experience of existing security and privacy systems for OSNs has been evaluated using query based techniques (questionnaires, interviews, focus groups) and through usability studies (observations, eye-tracking studies).

These requirements will be taken into consideration later in the project for the design guidelines and requirements of the ENCASE browser-add-ons. In line with the goals of ENCASE we carried out this task through a User-Centered Design approach.

To complete these tasks six studies were conducted, three in the form of meta-reviews of existing literature and three in the form of experimental studies. More specifically the following six studies were conducted:

1. “User behavior and experience when faced with security and privacy risks on OSN” (study 1) is an extensive literature review on user behavior and experience when faced with security and privacy risks on OSN.

2. “Meta-review on Cyberbullying” (study 2) is an extensive literature review that focuses on user behavior during this important and common online privacy and security issue.

3. “E-safety in Web 2.0 Learning Environments” (study 3) is a study where we explored the research and development pertaining to safety and security in Web 2.0 learning environments, as well as a review of web-based tools and applications that attempt to address security and privacy issues in OSNs.

4. “Discovering social bridges in Microblogs” (study 4) where we study the topology of a graphtowards detecting the so called “social bridges”, i.e. the major supporters of malicious users, who have links and ties to both honest and malicious user communities.

5. “Survey of use of OSNs by minors” (study 5) is a work where we report the results of a survey run in Greece, Cyprus, and UK investigating the perceptions and concerns of minor users of OSNs in relation to online security and privacy. The participants were 76 teenagers (ages 12-17), users of OSNs.

6. “Usability evaluation of fraud detection systems" (study 6) is a work where we evaluated selected software in terms of usability by analyzing user comments and eye tracking technology. The participants in this study were parents who interacted with the selected software/add-ons and were then asked to rate each software.

As a result of our effort in D3.1, the following papers have been published:

1. Gogoglou, A., Theodosiou, Z., Kounoudes, T., Vakali, A., & Manolopoulos, Y. (2016, December). Early malicious activity discovery in microblogs by social bridges detection. In Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT), 2016 IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 132-137). IEEE. [106].

2. Parmaxi, A., Papadamou, K., Sirivianos, M., & Stamatelatos, M. (2017, July). E-safety in Web 2.0 Learning Environments: A Research Synthesis and Implications for Researchers and Practitioners. In International Conference on Learning and Collaboration Technologies (pp. 249-261). Springer, Cham. [81].

3. Ioannou, A., Blackburn J., Stringhini, G., De Cristofaro, E., Kourtellis N., Sirivianos, M., Zaphiris, P. (2017). From Risk Factors to Detection and Intervention: A Metareview and Practical Proposal for Research on Cyberbullying, in IST-Africa 2017 [71].

This report starts with a Literature Review for the subject of the study including the definitions and meanings of Usability, Security and Privacy on OSNs, Sensitive Content and the description of User Centred Design. Then it continues with the description and results of the six aforementioned studies.