The impact of privacy indicators on search engine browsing patterns

Laboratory studies have shown that when online search engines’ results are annotated with privacy indicators, some consumers will pay a premium to make purchases from sites that have better privacy policies. To examine whether privacy indicators in search results also influence browsing behavior outside the laboratory, we conducted a field study in which participants used a search engine with privacy indicators. We collected over 15,000 search queries from 460 participants over a 10-month period. We found that when search results were annotated with privacy indicators, participants were more likely to visit sites with high privacy ratings, even when they appeared towards the bottom of the search results page. Sites with low privacy ratings did not have significantly different visitation rates than sites without any privacy ratings.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOUPS
• Authors: Janice Y. Tsai, Serge Egelman, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti
• Keywords: Privacy Indicators, Privacy Ratings, Search Engine, Security Privacy, SOUPS 2009