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Proper communication is key to the adoption and implementation of differential privacy (DP). In this work, we designed explanative illustrations of three DP models (Central DP, Local DP, Shuffler DP) to help laypeople conceptualize how random noise is added to protect individuals’ privacy and preserve group utility. Following a pilot survey and an interview, we conducted an online experiment ( N = 300) exploring participants’ comprehension, privacy and utility perception, and data-sharing decisions across the three DP models. We obtained empirical evidence showing participants’ acceptance of the Shuffler DP model for data privacy protection. We discuss the implications of our findings.

 

Rust is a young systems programming language designed to provide both the safety guarantees of high-level languages and the execution performance of low-level languages. To achieve this design goal, Rust provides a suite of safety rules and checks against those rules at the compile time to eliminate many memory-safety and thread-safety issues. Due to its safety and performance, Rust’s popularity has increased significantly in recent years, and it has already been adopted to build many safety-critical software systems. It is critical to understand the learning and programming challenges imposed by Rust’s safety rules. For this purpose, we first conducted an empirical study through close, manual inspection of 100 Rust-related Stack Overflow questions. We sought to understand (1) what safety rules are challenging to learn and program with, (2) under which contexts a safety rule becomes more difficult to apply, and (3) whether the Rust compiler is sufficiently helpful in debugging safety-rule violations. We then performed an online survey with 101 Rust programmers to validate the findings of the empirical study. We invited participants to evaluate program variants that differ from each other, either in terms of violated safety rules or the code constructs involved in the violation, and compared the participants’ performance on the variants. Our mixed-methods investigation revealed a range of consistent findings that can benefit Rust learners, practitioners, and language designers. 

Different techniques have been recommended to detect fraudulent responses in online surveys, but little research has been taken to systematically test the extent to which they actually work in practice. In this paper, we conduct an empirical evaluation of 22 antifraud tests in two complementary online surveys. The first survey recruits Rust programmers on public online forums and social media networks. We find that fraudulent respondents involve both bot and human characteristics. Among different anti-fraud tests, those designed based on domain knowledge are the most effective. By combining individual tests, we can achieve a detection performance as good as commercial techniques while making the results more explainable. To explore these tests under a broader context, we ran a different survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The results show that for a generic survey without requiring users to have any domain knowledge, it is more difficult to distinguish fraudulent responses. However, a subset of tests still remain effective. 

Differential privacy protects an individual's privacy by perturbing data on an aggregated level (DP) or individual level (LDP). We report four online human-subject experiments investigating the effects of using different approaches to communicate differential privacy techniques to laypersons in a health app data collection setting. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated participants' data disclosure decisions for low-sensitive and high-sensitive personal information when given different DP or LDP descriptions. Experiments 3 and 4 uncovered reasons behind participants' data sharing decisions, and examined participants' subjective and objective comprehensions of these DP or LDP descriptions. When shown descriptions that explain the implications instead of the definition/processes of DP or LDP technique, participants demonstrated better comprehension and showed more willingness to share information with LDP than with DP, indicating their understanding of LDP's stronger privacy guarantee compared with DP.