[short paper] Privacy in Mobile Personalized Systems: The Effect of Disclosure Justifications

Mobile applications increasingly use personalization, to maximize the relevance of displayed content and to simplify the user interaction. However, disclosing the personal information that is required for personalization makes many users feel uncomfortable. It is believed that empowering users to make their own privacy decisions by giving them adequate notifications and disclosure controls would increase their trust and satisfaction. However, in our study targeted at a mobile app recommender system, we saw the opposite user behavior: providing disclosure justifications decreased users’ disclosure, trust in the company, and satisfaction with the system. We present and discuss our unexpected findings and point at approaches to solve this problem.