The effects of introspection on creating privacy policy

Abstract

Prior work in psychology shows that introspection inhibits intuition: asking human users to analyze judgements they make can cause them to be quantitatively worse at making those judgments. In this paper, we explore whether this seemingly contradictory phenomenon also occurs when humans craft privacy policies for a Facebook-like social network. Our study presents empirical evidence that suggests the act of introspecting upon one's personal security policy actually makes one worse at making policy decisions; if one aims to reduce privacy spills, the data indicate that educating users before letting them set their privacy policies may actually increase the exposure of private information.