Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Nathaniel S. Good, Jens Grossklags, Deirdre Mulligan, Joseph A. Konstan. "Noticing notice: a large-scale experiment on the timing of software license agreements". CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, 607--616, January, 2007.

Abstract
Spyware is an increasing problem. Interestingly, many programs carrying spyware honestly disclose the activities of the software, but users install the software anyway. We report on a study of software installation to assess the effectiveness of different notices for helping people make better decisions on which software to install. Our study of 222 users showed that providing a short summary notice, in addition to the End User License Agreement (EULA), before the installation reduced the number of software installations significantly. We also found that providing the short summary notice after installation led to a significant number of uninstalls. However, even with the short notices, many users installed the program and later expressed regret for doing so. These results, along with a detailed analysis of installation, regret, and survey data about user behaviors informs our recommendations to policymakers and designers for assessing the "adequacy" of consent in the context of software that exhibits behaviors associated with spyware.

Electronic downloads

• http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240720

• HTML

  Nathaniel S. Good, Jens Grossklags, Deirdre Mulligan, Joseph
  A. Konstan. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/317.html"
  >Noticing notice: a large-scale experiment on the timing
  of software license agreements</a>, CHI '07:
  Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in
  computing systems, ACM, 607--616, January, 2007.

• Plain text

  Nathaniel S. Good, Jens Grossklags, Deirdre Mulligan, Joseph
  A. Konstan. "Noticing notice: a large-scale experiment
  on the timing of software license agreements". CHI '07:
  Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in
  computing systems, ACM, 607--616, January, 2007.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{GoodGrossklagsMulliganKonstan07_NoticingNoticeLargescaleExperimentOnTimingOfSoftware,
      author = {Nathaniel S. Good and Jens Grossklags and Deirdre
                Mulligan and Joseph A. Konstan},
      title = {Noticing notice: a large-scale experiment on the
                timing of software license agreements},
      booktitle = {CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on
                Human factors in computing systems},
      organization = {ACM},
      pages = {607--616},
      month = {January},
      year = {2007},
      abstract = {Spyware is an increasing problem. Interestingly,
                many programs carrying spyware honestly disclose
                the activities of the software, but users install
                the software anyway. We report on a study of
                software installation to assess the effectiveness
                of different notices for helping people make
                better decisions on which software to install. Our
                study of 222 users showed that providing a short
                summary notice, in addition to the End User
                License Agreement (EULA), before the installation
                reduced the number of software installations
                significantly. We also found that providing the
                short summary notice after installation led to a
                significant number of uninstalls. However, even
                with the short notices, many users installed the
                program and later expressed regret for doing so.
                These results, along with a detailed analysis of
                installation, regret, and survey data about user
                behaviors informs our recommendations to
                policymakers and designers for assessing the
                "adequacy" of consent in the context of software
                that exhibits behaviors associated with spyware. },
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/317.html}
  }
  

Posted by Christopher Brooks on 29 Feb 2008.
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