A/P(rivacy) Testing - Assessing Applications for Social and Institutional Privacy.

The way information systems are designed has a crucial effect on users' privacy, but users are rarely involved in Privacy-by-Design processes. To bridge this gap, we investigate how User-Centered Design (UCD) methods can be used to improve the privacy of systems' designs. We present the process of developing A/P(rivacy) Testing, a platform that allows designers to compare several privacy designs alternatives, eliciting end-users' privacy perceptions of a tested system or a feature (Figure 1). We describe three online experiments, with 959 participants, in which we created and validated the reliability of a scale for Users' Perceived Systems' Privacy (UPSP), and used it to compare between privacy designs alternatives by using scenarios and different variants. We show that A/B testing is applicable for privacy purposes and that our scale is differentiating between designs that perceived as legitimate and designs that may violate users' expectations.