Creepy Apps Cause Emotional Stress
hubie writes:
Researchers have measured how uncomfortable and 'creeped out' using apps can make us feel:
You would think that feeling chronically uneasy about products would spur a movement away from them. However, this is not the case for apps use. Even though surveys show users to feel emotional stress by the fact that apps collect personal data, we just continue our use.
"It seems that people accept this uneasy feeling almost as a part of the user experience. Somehow, we have been trained to live with being uncomfortable. But you may ask how it can be defensible to treat people and their emotional states so terribly," says Irina Shklovski [...]
"I think most of us have tried feeling uneasy when downloading apps, but most often you can't really put your finger on what the problem might be. So, we decided to create a way of measuring the degree of discomfort," Irina Shklovski says.
The researchers broke down the problem into three. To be creepy, an app needs to a) violate the boundaries of the user; b) do so unexpectedly; and c) possess ambiguity of threat. High scores in all three categories would amount to one very creepy app.
[...] In one regime, the app would collect your location. In another regime, it would soon start to make suggestions on more music from the identified artists. In yet another regime, the app would post on Facebook what you are listening to. Further, some participants were granted control of what the app was doing: they could approve or deny having their music habits displayed at Facebook.
"We had expected the group with control to feel more comfortable, but surprisingly they didn't," Irina Shklovski comments, noting that this is a major discovery:
[...] "We normally assume people who have a high degree of digital literacy to be more critical towards the apps, but again surprisingly, the opposite is true. The more you see yourself as digitally literate, the higher the likeliness of you continuing using an app which is invasive," says Irina Shklovski.
Journal Reference:
John S. Seberger, Irina Shklovski, Emily Swiatek, Sameer Patil. Still Creepy After All These Years: The Normalization of Affective Discomfort in App Use, [open] CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2022 Article No.: 159. (DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3502112)
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