Online Self-Disclosure and Offline Threat Detection

Human beings have evolved to detect and react to threats in their physical environment, and have developed perceptual systems to assess physical, sensorial stimuli for current, material risks. In cyberspace, those stimuli can be absent, subdued, or deliberately manipulated by antagonistic third parties. Security and privacy concerns that would normally be activated in the offline world, therefore, can remain muted, and defense behaviors can be hampered, online. In order to start understanding the interrelationships between online and offline threat detection and online decision making, we investigate the extent to which “visceral” stimuli in the physical world can impact security and privacy behavior in cyberspace. In particular, we present the design and results of a stream of controlled human subject experiments that explore the influence of sensorial stimuli (indicating the presence of other human beings in the proximal space of a subject) on subjects’ online disclosure of personal, and highly sensitive, behaviors. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under SATC Grant TWC SBES1228857 (Evolutionary Approaches to Privacy and Information Security), as well as under Grant CNS-1012763 (Nudging Users Towards Privacy), by CyLab at Carnegie Mellon under grants DAAD19-02-1-0389 and W911NF-09-1-0273 from the Army Research Office, and by the IWT SBO project on Security and Privacy in Online Social Networks (SPION).