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Recent privacy laws have strengthened data subjects’ right to access personal data collected by companies. Prior work has found that data exports companies provide consumers in response to Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) can be overwhelming and hard to understand. To identify directions for improving the user experience of data exports, we conducted an online study in which 33 participants explored their own data from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Spotify, or Uber. Participants articulated questions they hoped to answer using the exports. They also annotated parts of the data they found confusing, creepy, interesting, or surprising. While participants hoped to learn either about their own usage of the platform or how the company collects and uses their personal data, these questions were often left unanswered. Participants’ annotations documented their excitement at finding data records that triggered nostalgia, but also shock about the privacy implications of other data they saw. Having examined their data, many participants hoped to request the company erase some, but not all, of the data. We discuss opportunities for future transparency-enhancing tools and enhanced laws.
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Can "Conscious Data Contribution" Help Users to Exert "Data Leverage" Against Technology Companies?
Tech users currently have limited ability to act on concerns regarding the negative societal impacts of large tech companies. However, recent work suggests that users can exert leverage using their role in the generation of valuable data, for instance by withholding their data contributions to intelligent technologies. We propose and evaluate a new means to exert this type of leverage against tech companies: "conscious data contribution" (CDC). Users who participate in CDC exert leverage against a target tech company by contributing data to technologies operated by a competitor of that company. Using simulations, we find that CDC could be highly effective at reducing the gap in intelligent technologies performance between an incumbent and their competitors. In some cases, just 20% of users contributing data they have produced to a small competitor could help that competitor get 80% of the way towards the original company's best-case performance. We discuss the implications of CDC for policymakers, tech designers, and researchers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1815507
- PAR ID:
- 10404667
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- CSCW1
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 23
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Recent privacy laws have strengthened data subjects' right to access personal data collected by companies. Prior work has found that data exports companies provide consumers in response to Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) can be overwhelming and hard to understand. To identify directions for improving the user experience of data exports, we conducted an online study in which 33 participants explored their own data from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Spotify, or Uber. Participants articulated questions they hoped to answer using the exports. They also annotated parts of the export they found confusing, creepy, interesting, or surprising. While participants hoped to learn either about their own usage of the platform or how the company collects and uses their personal data, these questions were often left unanswered. Participants' annotations documented their excitement at finding data records that triggered nostalgia, but also shock and anger about the privacy implications of other data they saw. Having examining their data, many participants hoped to request the company erase some, but not all, of the data. We discuss opportunities for future transparency-enhancing tools and enhanced laws.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3449177
