Perceptions of the risks of password related activities

Abstract

Many studies have investigated people’s risky password related activities such as writing down passwords, sharing them with other people and re-using them across accounts, but few studies have investigated people’s perceptions of the risks of these activities. This paper reports on an online survey with 129 people rating the risks of 11 different password related activities in four domains (social networking, email, eBanking and eCommerce). There were fewer differences between the perceived riskiness of activities due to domain than expected, but differences between the activities and the numbers of respondents who said they would engage in the different activities. There were interesting patterns of differences in the ratings of the riskiness, severity of the consequences, usefulness and likelihood of encountering the different activities, which may help explain why people undertake risky password activities.

Affiliations

Human Computer Interaction Research Group

Department of Computer Science

University of York

York YO10 5GH UK

Contributors

Burak Merdenyan

Helen Petrie

Conference

Publication date: July 2017

Publication date (Print): July 2017

Pages: 1-10

ID: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2017.54

Copyright statement: © Merdenyan et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development. Proceedings of British HCI 2017 – Digital Make-Believe, Sunderland, UK.

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2017)

Conference acronym: EVA

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 11 – 13 July 2017

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2017.54

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing