Human-centered privacy (HCP) is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of psychology, digital technology, and computer science. Psychologically, HCP explores individuals' perceptions, emotions, motivations, behaviors, and attitudes toward privacy, including those of specific user groups such as companies. This underscores the importance of understanding how various psychological factors influence privacy-related decisions at both the individual and group levels. However, research that investigates privacy with a focus on the intersection of experimental psychology and computer science remains limited. In this presentation, we share findings from our research projects that investigate key aspects of HCP, such as privacy awareness, trust in privacy, attitudes toward privacy, and privacy-preserving behaviors, in relation to privacy-by-design, digital software development, use cases, and various applications. Our joint research, conducted as part of the PrivateEye project, is grounded in relevant psychological theories and experimental methods. Based on our experimental results, we discuss how human factors, including personality, language, privacy experience, age, gender, culture, education, familiarity with digital media, and adherence to ethical and GDPR standards, may influence privacy-related decisions and user experience. These results should then guide and support the development of technical privacy solutions, such as the PeQUES and PrePAMS platforms that we have developed to support privacy-preserving web-based surveys, which we will also introduce in our talk.

Funding: Our joint projects are in part funded by the DAAD under the Taz’iz funding. https://www.daad.de/en/information-services-for-higher-education-institutions/further-information-on-daad-programmes/taziz-partnership/