TWC SBES: Medium: Collaborative: Evolutionary Approaches to Privacy and Information Security

该项目探讨了离线提示和刺激的影响，这些提示和刺激表明了现实世界中其他人的存在，并且经常被我们的大脑无意识地处理，可能对网络空间中的安全和隐私行为产生影响。该项目是基于一个进化猜想：人类已经进化到能够探测和应对物理环境中的威胁，并且已经开发出感知系统来评估这些“物理”威胁。刺激当前的物质风险。在网络空间中，同样的刺激往往是不存在的，被压制的，或者被第三方故意操纵的。因此，通常会在离线世界中激活的安全和隐私问题受到了限制，并且阻碍了防御行为。虽然无法直接检验这一猜想，但通过研究物理世界中的外部刺激对网络空间安全和隐私行为的影响，可以获得与这一猜想相一致的间接证据。拟议的研究包括一系列人类受试者控制实验，调查各种刺激或线索的影响。这项研究的意义是双重的。首先，它试图推动科学理解是什么使得网络空间中的安全和隐私决策与现实世界中的安全和隐私决策有独特的不同，有时甚至比现实世界中的安全和隐私决策更困难。其次，通过调查可能显著破坏网络空间用户行为的因素，研究结果可以启发构建诱导更安全行为的系统。

The project explores the influence that offline cues and stimuli, indicating the presence of other human beings in the physical world, and often processed unconsciously by our brains, can have over security and privacy behavior in cyberspace. The project is predicated around an evolutionary conjecture: Human beings have evolved to detect and react to threats in their physical environment, and have developed perceptual systems selected to assess these ?physical? stimuli for current, material risks. In cyberspace, the same stimuli often are absent, subdued, or intentionally manipulated by third parties. Hence, security and privacy concerns that would normally be activated in the offline world are restrained, and defense behaviors are hampered.While it is impossible to test such conjecture directly, indirect evidence compatible with the conjecture can be obtained by investigating the impact that external stimuli in the physical world have on security and privacy behavior in cyberspace. The proposed research consists in a stream of human subjects controlled experiments investigating such impact of various sets of stimuli or cues. This significance of this research is two-fold. First, it attempts to advance the scientific understanding of what makes security and privacy decision making in cyberspace uniquely different from, and sometimes more difficult than security and privacy in the physical world. Second, by investigating a factor that may significantly disrupt user behavior in cyberspace, the research findings could inspire the construction of systems that induce more secure behavior.