Principal Investigator: Melanie Volkamer

In this project, we investigated mental models of users of IT-based adaptive systems with a specific focus on privacy risks due to sharing various types of personal information with adaptive systems. 

Within an online survey with 62 participants, we found that only 56.5% of our participants could provide a suitable definition of IT-based Adaptive Systems, even though 72.58% said that they had heard of IT-based Adaptive Systems before. While we found that our participants were aware of some IT-based Adaptive Systems they use in their everyday lives (e.g., Navigation, Entertainment, Social Media, or Browsing), they could not imagine the full potential of such systems (e.g., for manufacturing or in healthcare). Regarding risks, most participants mentioned security based ones (27.59% of answers), e.g., „Breach of information and data“, with privacy ones as second (18.72%), e.g. „Tracking and Profiling“.

Information on these mental models serve as basis for the user-centered process of designing IT-based adaptive systems which enable informed decisions by users with respect to which data they do (not) want to share while being aware of the positive and negative consequences of their decisions.