Gamifying The Process Of Privacy Disclosure

Gamified designs are becoming widely used by social networks and mobile applications into most aspects of our daily life, such as encouraging location sharing with badges in Foursquare, reporting traffic status with points in Waze and learning languages with progress bars in Duolingo. With this trend, users are required to disclose more of their private data to the service providers to get a better service. Privacy concerns reduce users’ willingness to share their private information, while users are willing to disclose some privacy for a clear benefit, which is pointed in some research. The private information that users’ disclose in applications not only facilitates the vitality and popularity of the application communities, but also provides a way for service providers to tailor the services for better human-computer interaction experience.Knowing the importance of users’privacy on the development of applications, I explored the groundbreaking area of gamification and privacy. Even though research on gamification has reached several areas, it is still vacuum in gamifying the process of privacy disclosure. The research in such area helps the exploration to the range within which gamification can be adopted as well as facilitates the human-computer interaction experience.This thesis researched on the effects of gamifying the process of data disclosure on users disclosing behaviors. A survey was designed and implemented in the form of an online anonymous questionnaire to confirm which gamification design elements should be used for gamifying the process of privacy disclosure. Then, based on the analysis of the201answer sheets from the questionnaire, a contrast experiment was carried out to explore the influence of the gamification design elements on privacy disclosure. The experiment collected users’ behavioral data via an application known as "Diet Recorder" which adopted the gamification elements identified in the survey. The results of the experiment show that the gamified design would encourage users to disclose more privacy in the application. Therefore it is recommended that gamification is used in order to encourage user to disclose more information under certain contexts such as diet or food.