Privacy Nudges for Mobile Applications: Effects on the Creepiness Emotion and Privacy Attitudes

To assist users' privacy decision-making with mobile applications, prior research has investigated ways of enhancing information transparency, via improving privacy permission interfaces. This study takes a soft paternalism approach by proposing two interface cues as "privacy nudges" in a mobile permission interface: the frequency nudge indicates how frequently user information is used, and the social nudge presents the percentage of other users approving certain data permission. We compared the effects of these privacy nudges on users' creepiness emotion and privacy attitudes, through a between-subject online experimental study (n=387). Our results suggest that privacy nudges are effective in altering privacy attitudes, but the direction of effects depends on the nudge's framing valence. In addition, the creepiness emotion mediates the relationship between nudging and privacy attitudes.