A preliminary study on evaluating cumulative revelations in online personal data: introducing a persona-based cyber safety tool for awareness of online risks and harms

Searching for people online is a common search task that most of us have performed at some point or other. With so much information about people available online it is often quite amazing what one can find out about someone else -- especially when information taken from various sources is pieced together to create a more detailed picture of the individual, and used to make inferences about them. These "cumulative revelations"’ gleaned from one’s online digital footprint create potential risks to the individual (e.g. identity theft, stalking, harassment, cyberbullying, loss employment opportunities, etc.). In this work, we present a cyber-safety tool designed to explore how people assess and judge the relevance and risks of small, apparently innocuous pieces of information associated with fictitious personas when searching and browsing online profiles and social media. The tool aims to provide education and awareness of the potential risks of cumulative revelations by having participants engage with different scenarios. In a study conducted with over 200 participants on two different search scenarios (identity theft, online reputation) we found that participants' ability to identify risky posts and piece together revelations varied considerably across the population. However, most participants reported increased awareness and understanding of risks and threats posed by their online information behaviours.