Web privacy perceptions amongst Indian users

Abstract

While personalized content in the digital world is necessary for a better browsing experience, users knowingly or unknowingly share a lot of data with third-party advertising networks, market analysts, and trackers. Although India is the second largest online market in the world, the privacy perceptions of Indian users is not well understood.

The focus of this work is to investigate the understanding of privacy on the web amongst Indians, and to provide a basis for making web privacy features more usable among Indian users. Through this user study, we want to understand how different attributes affect privacy choices of the users when they are accessing the web. We also investigate if the users are aware of various ways in which websites and web applications collect information, their implications, different options to handle their privacy, and if the usability of privacy settings affects their decision-making.

This study sheds light on the prevalence of various privacy violations or information leaks, if and how they target a group of people, and why they succeed. The survey also acts as an informative revision of the different aspects regarding privacy for the users from India.