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

该项目探索了线下线索和刺激可能对网络空间中的安全和隐私行为产生的影响，这些线索和刺激指示着物理世界中其他人的存在，通常是由我们的大脑无意识地处理的。该项目基于一个进化论猜想：人类已经进化到能够检测并对其物理环境中的威胁做出反应，并且已经开发出感知系统来评估这些？物理？对当前重大风险的刺激。在网络空间，同样的刺激通常是不存在的、被抑制的，或者被第三方故意操纵的。因此，通常在线下世界中被激活的安全和隐私担忧被抑制，防御行为受到阻碍。虽然不可能直接检验这种猜想，但可以通过调查物理世界中的外部刺激对网络空间中的安全和隐私行为的影响来获得与该猜想相一致的间接证据。这项拟议的研究包括一系列人类受试者对照实验，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，它试图推进对是什么使网络空间的安全和隐私决策与物理世界的安全和隐私截然不同，有时甚至更困难的科学理解。其次，通过调查一个可能显著扰乱网络空间用户行为的因素，研究结果可能会激励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.