Breaking! A Typology of Security and Privacy News and How It's Shared
Sauvik Das, Das, Joanne Lo, Laura Dabbish, and Jason Hong
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
April 2018
News coverage of security and privacy (S&P) events is pervasive and may affect the salience of S&P threats to the public. To better understand this coverage and its effects, we asked: What types of S&P news come into people’s awareness? How do people hear about and share this news? Over two years, we recruited 1999 participants to fill out a survey on emergent S&P news events. We identified four types of S&P news: financial data breaches, corporate personal data breaches, high sensitivity systems breaches, and politicized / activist cybersecurity. These event types strongly correlated with how people shared S&P news—e.g., financial data breaches were shared most (42%), while politicized / activist cybersecurity events were shared least (21%). Furthermore, participants’ age, gender and security behavioral intention strongly correlated with how they heard about and shared S&P news—e.g., males more often felt a personal responsibility to share, and older people were less likely to hear about S&P news through conversation.
