This paper explores how personal attributes, such as age, gender, technological expertise, or “need for touch”, correlate with people’s preferences for properties of tangible privacy protection mechanisms, for example, physically covering a camera. For this, we conducted an online survey (N = 444) where we captured participants’ preferences of eight established tangible privacy mechanisms well-known in daily life, their perceptions of effective privacy protection, and personal attributes. We found that the attributes that correlated most strongly with participants’ perceptions of the established tangible privacy mechanisms were their “need for touch” and previous experiences with the mechanisms. We use our findings to identify desirable characteristics of tangible mechanisms to better inform future tangible, digital, and mixed privacy protections. We also show which individuals benefit most from tangibles, ultimately motivating a more individual and effective approach to privacy protection in the future.

The use of symbols and metaphors can be a fast and effective way of conveying abstract concepts. At the same time, misconceived symbols can lead to misunderstandings and errors. Therefore, when it comes to privacy and security, clear communication is essential to avoid putting users’ personal data at risk. In this paper, we elicit 32 symbols and metaphors associated with privacy and security through two brainstorming sessions (n = 8, each). Six experts further separated this collection into security and privacy-related symbols and generated clusters based on similarity. Using participants’ clusters, we derived underlying themes. As a result, we present a symbol and metaphor space for privacy and security and discuss their perceived meaning. Our findings can serve researchers, designers, and developers to find suitable symbols or metaphors for a given scenario (e.g., to decide on the interaction metaphor for a tangible security mechanism) and to understand if a symbol is ambiguous or how it may be understood (e.g., is an eye associated with privacy configurations?). Our work provides an initial knowledge base supporting effective communication in this field.