Pilot 8

New in this pilot

There are now two harm-first scenarios, for photos/videos and emails, at the start. The answers are not paired to the initial 3 event stories. (see to-do)

All event-first scenarios are now randomized. Paired scenarios (compromise vs. lock-out) are always adjacent but their order is randomized (so questions about devices will always be together, but compromise may be before lock-out or vice versa).

For the paired scenarios, the intro paragraph covers scope for both the compromise and lock-out scenario (devices in scope, accounts out of scope; social accounts in scope, other types of accounts out of scope, etc.).

A few answers were added mid-pilot after 10 participants and then after 20, so the pilot is for testing purposes and not interpretive purposes.

If these 20 participants are representative of the population, a big headline of this study is that data loss is a huge problem and that while tech promises to ensure our memories do not degrade over time, it's collectively failing to deliver that.

Results

There were 20 participants in this pilot. We paid more ($4.50) since the survey now takes a median of ~15 minutes. We learned that the great majority of people have lost photos and emails. Loss, it seems, is expected. This seems to capture something that our event-focused scenarios do not.

The new event-focused scenarios seem to capture a good deal of what our old event-focused scenarios missed.

Participants started by writing loss stories about the three worst technology-related harms they had experienced.

We then told participants we would "describe technology-related harms that that have happened to others, and ask if they have also happened to" them.

New Graphs

Summary Across Scenarios

A bar chart summarizing the percent of participants who had experienced each harm scenario. — The percent of participants who had experienced each harm scenario. Losses due to failures of security measures to protect participants from attack are paired (left bar) against harms due to security measures themselves harming participants (right bar).

When participants reported having suffered one of the described scenarios, we asked them how recently they had experienced it.

A bar chart summarizing how recently participants who had experienced each harm scenario. — The absolute number of participants who had experienced each harm scenario for each level of recency.

Recovery duration for each scenario (absolute figures).

Have older people experienced more types of harmful events?

Scenario Pair: Device Compromise & Lockout

We asked participants who had a device compromised/stolen or locked what type of device it was. (If they had experienced more than one incident of a scenario we asked about the worst.)