Turtles, Locks, and Bathrooms

We have had  so much fun looking at all of the privacy images that people have contributed to our collection, so we decided to analyze them and write a research paper. PhD student Maggie Oates presented our paper at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium this week, where it won the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award!

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Are the many formal definitions and frameworks of privacy consistent with a layperson’s under-standing of privacy? We explored this question and identified mental models and metaphors of privacy, conceptual tools that can be used to improve privacy tools, communication, and design for everyday users. Our investigation focused on a qualitative analysis of 366 drawings of privacy from laypeople, privacy experts, children, and adults. Illustrators all responded to the prompt “What does privacy mean to you?” We coded each image for content, identifying themes from established privacy frameworks and defining the visual and conceptual metaphors illustrators used to model privacy. We found that many non-expert drawings illustrated a strong divide between public and private physical spaces, while experts were more likely to draw nuanced data privacy spaces. Young children’s drawings focused on bedrooms, bathrooms, or cheating on schoolwork, and seldom addressed data privacy. The metaphors, themes, and symbols identified by these findings can be used for improving privacy communication, education, and design by inspiring and informing visual and conceptual strategies for reaching laypeople.

You can download the paper and check it out:

Maggie Oates, Yama Ahmadullah, Abigail Marsh, Chelse Swoopes, Shikun Zhang, Rebecca Balebako, and Lorrie Cranor. Turtles, Locks, and Bathrooms: Understanding Mental Models of Privacy Through Illustration. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies ; 2018 (4):5–32.