Exploring Psychological Need Fulfillment for Security and Privacy Actions on Smartphones

Much work has been conducted to investigate the obstacles that keep users from using mitigations against security and privacy threats on smartphones. By contrast, we conducted in-depth interviews (n = 19) to explore users’ motivations for voluntarily applying security and privacy actions on smartphones. Our work focuses on analyzing intrinsic motivation in terms of psychological need fulfillment. Our findings provide first insights on the salience of basic psychological needs in the context of smartphone security and privacy. They illustrate how security and privacy actions on smartphones are motivated by a variety of psychological needs, only one of them being the need for Security. Moreover, the results illustrate how psychological needs can help to explain the adoption of security and privacy technologies and the interaction with those technologies. We further discuss how the design of security and privacy technologies could be guided by the gained knowledge.