TY - GEN
T1 - Secrecy, flagging, and paranoia
T2 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006
AU - Gaw, Shirley
AU - Felten, Edward W.
AU - Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - We consider the social context behind users' decisions about whether and when to encrypt email, interviewing a sample of users from an organization whose mission requires secrecy. Interview participants varied in their level of technical sophistication and in their involvement with secrets. We found that users saw universal, routine use of encryption as paranoid. Encryption flagged a message not only as confidential but also as urgent, so users found the encryption of mundane messages annoying. In general, decisions about encryption were driven not just by technical issues such as usability, but also by social factors. We argue that understanding these social factors is necessary to guide the design of encryption technologies that can be more widely adopted.
AB - We consider the social context behind users' decisions about whether and when to encrypt email, interviewing a sample of users from an organization whose mission requires secrecy. Interview participants varied in their level of technical sophistication and in their involvement with secrets. We found that users saw universal, routine use of encryption as paranoid. Encryption flagged a message not only as confidential but also as urgent, so users found the encryption of mundane messages annoying. In general, decisions about encryption were driven not just by technical issues such as usability, but also by social factors. We argue that understanding these social factors is necessary to guide the design of encryption technologies that can be more widely adopted.
KW - Activism
KW - Encrypted e-mail
KW - Extended case method
KW - Security
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/33745812088
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/33745812088#tab=citedBy
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33745812088
SN - 1595931783
SN - 9781595931788
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 591
EP - 600
BT - CHI 2006
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 22 April 2006 through 27 April 2006
ER -