A new study from BYU and Google Chrome engineers, finds that warning messages appearing while you’re surfing or watching video for example are ignored 90% of the time. From the abstract of the study:
Our findings suggest that although alerts are pervasive in personal computing, they should be bounded in their presentation. The timing of interruptions strongly influences the occurrence of DTI in the brain, which in turn substantially impacts alert disregard. This paper provides a theoretically grounded, cost-effective approach to reduce the effects of DTI for a wide variety of interruptive messages that are important but do not require immediate attention.
By the way, dual-task interference or DTI is a cognitive limitation in which even simple tasks cannot be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss.
Here’s the thing: I agree, but don’t agree with this study. I do agree that security warnings are ignored routinely. But I think there’s more at play here. For example security warnings are either not cleear or not useful. UAC in Windows Vista being the perfect example of this. Another factor, people are encouraged to ignore these warnings. How many times have you installed a piece of software and been told by the installation instructions to ignore or dismiss any warnings from your anti-virus software that might appear. Thus I think the issue is a multi-dimensional one that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
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This entry was posted on August 18, 2016 at 11:40 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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#Fail: People Ignore Security Warnings 90% Of The Time
A new study from BYU and Google Chrome engineers, finds that warning messages appearing while you’re surfing or watching video for example are ignored 90% of the time. From the abstract of the study:
Our findings suggest that although alerts are pervasive in personal computing, they should be bounded in their presentation. The timing of interruptions strongly influences the occurrence of DTI in the brain, which in turn substantially impacts alert disregard. This paper provides a theoretically grounded, cost-effective approach to reduce the effects of DTI for a wide variety of interruptive messages that are important but do not require immediate attention.
By the way, dual-task interference or DTI is a cognitive limitation in which even simple tasks cannot be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss.
Here’s the thing: I agree, but don’t agree with this study. I do agree that security warnings are ignored routinely. But I think there’s more at play here. For example security warnings are either not cleear or not useful. UAC in Windows Vista being the perfect example of this. Another factor, people are encouraged to ignore these warnings. How many times have you installed a piece of software and been told by the installation instructions to ignore or dismiss any warnings from your anti-virus software that might appear. Thus I think the issue is a multi-dimensional one that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
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This entry was posted on August 18, 2016 at 11:40 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.