The project Awareness Learning Tools for Data Sharing Everywhere (ALerT) concerns sharing of personal data and how these data are used by commercial companies and other entities in the digital environments. Advancements in information technology have made people less aware of the collection and usage of personal data. As a result, individuals rarely have clear knowledge of what information other people and firms store about them or how that information is used. Sometimes the applications and services that we use are personalized, and hence useful to us, but unwanted use is also common.

ALerT’s objective is to investigate how to evoke reflection about sharing of personal data and privacy with serious games and scenario tools. ALerT will develop tools for evoking awareness about personal information in digital environments.

Research questions

• By using serious games or simulations, can we evokeawareness about personal information, and the information is used?
• Can we develop tools that monitor sharing of data, tools that take into account privacy?
• How should we visualize data, that is what is happing to data back-stage?

Partners

In ALerT we combine serious game techniques with experimental methods from psychology and decision science, with knowledge on privacy and digital rights. The interdisciplinary project team includes experts from ICT, serious games techniques, security, privacy, education, psychology and decision science. The partners are NTNU, UiB, Forbrukerrådet (the Norwegian Consumer Council) and Norwegian Computer Center (NR).

2020:

Report (in Norwegian): Norwegian citizens and sharing of personal data.

2019:

Report (in Norwegian): Norwegian citizens and sharing of personal data. Results from two national surveys.

ALerT2017

ALerT received funding from IKTpluss/Research Council Norway for 2017. For 2017 the activities have been an European Survey in 10 countries, a workshop with youth at upper-secondary schools, and a workshop together with the Research Council of Norway in Brussel with digital rights- and privacy experts. We presented the results and key-findings for the Research Council Norway and an international panel in December, and was awarded funding for 2018-2021.

In 2017 we have formed an Advisory Group lead by dr. Lothar Fritsch, Karlstad University. The additional members of the Advisory Group are; Jolanda Girzl, Director Konsument Europa/ECC Sweden, Marit Hansen, Data Protection Commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein and leader of Independent Centre of Privacy Protection/ULD, and Dr. Tor Endestad, Department of Psychology, and leader of the EBIG-lab and FRONT neurolab at the University of Oslo.

International experts

John Waterworth is a senior professor of informatics at Umeå University, Sweden. He has a PhD in experimental psychology. He will contribute to the work on choice experiments user behavior in the project. 

ALerT2018-2021

The project started April 4th with a seminar at NR.

From 2019, the ALerT-team will include a Postdoctoral fellow at UiB and a PhD fellow at NTNU.  
 

2018

The following papers have been presented:

Tjostheim, I. & Fritsch, L. (2018) Similar Information Privacy Behavior in 60-65s vs. 50-59ers - Findings From A European Survey on The Elderly. Proceedings of the Mobile Privacy and Security for an Ageing Population workshop at the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI) 2018; September 3, 2018, Barcelona, Spain, Barcelona: University of Bath; Cranfield University; Northumbria University, Newcastle; University of Portsmouth, 2018.

Fritsch, L., Tjostheim, I. & Kitkowska, A. (2018) I’m Not That Old Yet! The Elderly and Us in HCI and Assistive Technology. Proceedings of the Mobile Privacy and Security for an Ageing Population workshop at the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI) 2018; September 3, 2018, Barcelona, Spain, Barcelona: University of Bath; Cranfield University; Northumbria University, Newcastle; University of Portsmouth, 2018.

Bergen, E., Solberg, D. F., Sæthre, T. H. & Divitini, M. (2018) Supporting the co-design of games for privacy awareness. The 21th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2018). Kos, Greece, 25-28, September 2018

Leister, W. & Tjostheim, I. (2018) Which Generation Shows the Most Prudent data Sharing Behaviour? at Amsterdam Privacy Conference (APC2018), 4.- 8. October 2018.

In June, the Norwegian Consumer Council published the report Deceived by design. The report shows that for sharing of personal data, companies have little intention in giving the users actual choices. In Facebook, Google and Windows 10 you can change the settings and reduce the sharing of data, but you will get a warning. They threaten the users with loss of functionality or deletion of the user account if the user does choose this option. These service providers employ numerous tactics in order to push consumers toward sharing as much data as possible.

In many homes smart speakers are used, but consumers are not always aware of the privacy implications of this technology.

Many application uses location data. Google, with google maps and other services is one of major players in this area. In November, the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) published the report Every Step You Take that document that "consumers are deceived into being tracked when they use Google services. This happens through a variety of techniques, including withholding or hiding information, deceptive design practices, and bundling of services." One of the claims is that Google may be violating the new European GDPR privacy law. 

2019

UiB has recruited a post-doctoral fellow that will work on decision behavior and choice expriments in the project. His name is Angelo Pirrone. At NTNU the PhD-fellow Patrick Jost started April 1. He will work on serious games.

Publications

Some findings are published in a report based on two studies with Norwegian citizens about sharing of personal data.

2020

Topic 1 – data sharing

Forbrukerrådet, January 14.2020). Out of Control. How consumers are exploited by the online advertising industry. https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2020-01-14-out-...

Tjostheim, I., Waterworth, J.A. (2020) Predicting personal susceptibility to phishing. In: Rocha, Á., Ferrás, C., Montenegro Marin, C.E., Medina García, V.H. (eds.) ICITS 2020. AISC, vol. 1137, pp. 564–575. Springer, Cham (2020).

Toresson L., Shaker M., Olars S., Fritsch L. (2020) PISA: A Privacy Impact Self-assessment App Using Personas to Relate App Behavior to Risks to Smartphone Users. In: Stephanidis C., Antona M. (eds) HCI International 2020 - Posters. HCII 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1226. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50732-9_79

Topic 2 – public concerns about the tech future

Tjostheim I., Waterworth J.A. (2020) Inverting the Panopticon to Safeguard Privacy in Ambient Environments: An Exploratory Study. In: Streitz N., Konomi S. (eds) Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12203. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50344-4_25

Kalimeri K., Tjostheim I. (2020) Artificial Intelligence and Concerns About the Future: A Case Study in Norway. In: Streitz N., Konomi S. (eds) Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12203. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50344-4_20

Vanessa Ayres-Pereira, Angelo Pirrone, Ingvar Tjostheim, Gisela Böhm (2020)
Privacy Concern and Privacy-Protective Behavior: The Privacy Paradox in the Context of Mobile Applications, The 6th Society for Risk Analysis - Europe Nordic Chapter conference, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania.

NR-Report #1051
Nordmenn og deling av persondata
ISBN: 978-82-539-0561-7

Topic 3 – Games for privacy awareness and behavior change

Erlend Bergen, E., Solberg, D. F., Sæthre, T. H. & Divitini, M. (2020) Supporting the Co-design of Games for Privacy Awareness, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, ISSN 2194-5357, e-ISSN 2194-5365

Jost, P. , Böhm, G. Divitini, M. & Tjostheim, I. (2020) ALerT – Learning about Privacy at the Time of data Sharing Everywhere. The Climate Action, 2020 - ercim-news.ercim.eu. https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN121/EN121-web.pdf#page=33

Jost, P. & Divitini, M. (2020) The Challenge Game Frame: Affordance oriented Co-Creation of Privacy Decision Games. ECGBL 2020 14th European Conference on Game-Based Learning. ISSN 2049-0992 , e-ISSN 2049-100X

Jost, P. (2020) The Quest Game-Frame: Balancing Serious Games for Investigating Privacy Decisions. Proceedings of the 11th Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems (SCIS2020) ISBN: 978-91-88947-82-6

Jost, P. & Divitini, M. (2020) Game elicitation: exploring assistance in delayed-effect supply chain decision making. NordiCHI '20: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society, Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, ISBN: 978-1-4503-7579-5

Jost, P. (2020) Because it is Fun: Investigating Motives of Fake News Sharing with Exploratory Game Quests, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2020) ISBN: 978-989-8704-22-1

Jost, P. (2020) Pedagogical agents: Influences of artificially generated instructor personas on taking chances, NIKT: Norsk IKT-konferanse for forskning og utdanning, ISSN 1892-0713 , e-ISSN 1892-0721

Karen Maria Nyvol (2020) Game Concept: Dark Pattern (a game based on One Night Ultinate Werewolf), Master thesis, NTNU, June 2020.

Please contact Senior Research Scientist and project-leader Ingvar Tjostheim (+47 97 57 30 87) for more information.