A Framework for Reasoning about Social Influences on Security and Privacy Adoption

Much research has found that social influences (such as social proof, storytelling, and advice-seeking) help boost security awareness. But we have lacked a systematic approach to tracing how awareness leads to action, and to identifying which social influences can be leveraged at each step. Toward this goal, we develop a framework that synthesizes our design ideation, expertise, prior work, and new interview data into a six-step adoption process. This work contributes a prototype framework that accounts for social influences by step. It adds to what is known in the literature and the SIGCHI community about the social-psychological drivers of security adoption. Future work should establish whether this process is the same regardless of culture, demographic variation, or work vs. home context, and whether it is a reliable theoretical basis and method for designing experiments and focusing efforts where they are likely to be most productive.