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"What you think is private is no longer" -- Investigating the Aftermath of Shoulder Surfing on Smartphones in Everyday Life through the Eyes of the Victims

Habiba Farzand, Shaun Macdonald, Karola Marky, Mohamed Khamis

Abstract

Shoulder surfing has been studied extensively, however, it remains unexplored whether and how it impacts users. Understanding this is important as it determines whether shoulder surfing poses a significant concern and, if so, how best to address it. By surveying smartphone users in the UK, we explore how shoulder surfing impacts a) the privacy perceptions of victim users and b) their interaction with smartphones. We found that the impact of being shoulder surfed is highly individual. It is perceived as unavoidable and frequently occurring, leading to increased time for task completion. Individuals are concerned for their own and other peoples privacy, seeing shoulder surfing as a gateway to more serious threats like identity or device theft. Participants expressed a willingness to alter their behaviour and use software based protective measures to prevent shoulder surfing, yet, this comes with a set of user defined criteria, such as effectiveness, affordability, reliability, and availability. We discuss future work directions for user-centred shoulder surfing mitigation.

"What you think is private is no longer" -- Investigating the Aftermath of Shoulder Surfing on Smartphones in Everyday Life through the Eyes of the Victims

Abstract

Shoulder surfing has been studied extensively, however, it remains unexplored whether and how it impacts users. Understanding this is important as it determines whether shoulder surfing poses a significant concern and, if so, how best to address it. By surveying smartphone users in the UK, we explore how shoulder surfing impacts a) the privacy perceptions of victim users and b) their interaction with smartphones. We found that the impact of being shoulder surfed is highly individual. It is perceived as unavoidable and frequently occurring, leading to increased time for task completion. Individuals are concerned for their own and other peoples privacy, seeing shoulder surfing as a gateway to more serious threats like identity or device theft. Participants expressed a willingness to alter their behaviour and use software based protective measures to prevent shoulder surfing, yet, this comes with a set of user defined criteria, such as effectiveness, affordability, reliability, and availability. We discuss future work directions for user-centred shoulder surfing mitigation.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 48 sections, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. The Prevalence of Shoulder Surfing
  4. Users Responses to Privacy Violations & Shoulder Surfing
  5. Existing Software-based Mitigations to Shoulder Surfing
  6. Methodology
  7. Questionnaire Design
  8. Study Procedure
  9. Pilot Testing
  10. Ethical Considerations
  11. Recruitment & Participants
  12. Limitations
  13. Data Analysis
  14. Results
  15. Setting the Narrative of Shoulder Surfing:
  16. ...and 33 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: The Figure shows the overview of the qualifiers and respective frequencies of codes throughout our results. All occurrences of the respective qualifiers always refer to the same portion of the number of times codes.
  • Figure 2: The Figure shows the boxplots for the responses of participants to the questions centred around the impact of shoulder surfing.
  • Figure 3: High-level summary of the key findings of the impact of shoulder surfing. (The image uses figures by Deivid Saenz and Sofia Salazar Deividsofia. The overall figure was created using CANVA under free license canva.