Responsibility, Trust, and Monitoring Tools for End-User Account Security

Threats to online accounts are increasingly more sophisticated and proactive defences may be insufficient. We explore the role of users in monitoring of their accounts. First, we prototyped an account monitoring app that allows users to monitor the activity of many accounts at once. We present the prototype app and the results of a lab study with 15 participants to explore its usability. We identifiedfi external factors influencing adoption relating to user trust of security tools and service providers. We next conducted a study of 170 participants in an online survey to explore responsibility, trust, and monitoring for account security. We identified a mismatch in perceived responsibility between users and service providers, explored the trust cues participants use to trust their service providers, and explored end user activity log practices for account monitoring. We also designed and evaluated two updated activity log designs based on feedback from our fifirst study.