Established in 2006, TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited operates as the nodal point for Tata businesses in West Africa. TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited has a strong presence in Nigeria with investments exceeding USD 10 million. The company was established in Lagos, Nigeria as a subsidiary of TATA Africa Holdings (SA) (Pty) Limited, South Africa and serves as the hub of Tata’s operations in Nigeria and the rest of West Africa.

What About Us

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

We present the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking conducted to date, based on a crawl of the top 1 million websites. We make 15 types of measurements on each site, including stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites ("cookie syncing"). Our findings include multiple sophisticated fingerprinting techniques never before measured in the wild. This measurement is made possible by our open-source web privacy measurement tool, OpenWPM, which uses an automated version of a full-fledged consumer browser. It supports parallelism for speed and scale, automatic recovery from failures of the underlying browser, and comprehensive browser instrumentation. We demonstrate our platform's strength in enabling researchers to rapidly detect, quantify, and characterize emerging online tracking behaviors.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2976749.2978313

Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis

Social media are popular stages for self-expression, communication and self-promotion. Rather than facilitating online identity formation, they are sites of struggle between users, employers and platform owners to control online identities – a struggle played out at the level of the interface. This article offers a comparative interface analysis between Facebook and LinkedIn. While Facebook is particularly focused on facilitating personal self-presentation, LinkedIn’s interface caters towards the need for professional self-promotion. And yet, both platforms deploy similar principles of connectivity and narrative – strategies that can be succinctly revealed in recent interface changes. These changing digital architectures form the necessary backdrop for asking critical questions about online self-presentation: How are public identities shaped through platform interfaces? How do these features enable and constrain the sculpting of personal and professional persona? And what are the consequences of imposed c...

'You have one identity': performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn

The Economic Approach To Human Behavior

Advancements in information technology often task users with complex and consequential privacy and security decisions A growing body of research has investigated individuals’ choices in the presence of privacy and information security tradeoffs, the decision-making hurdles affecting those choices, and ways to mitigate such hurdles This article provides a multi-disciplinary assessment of the literature pertaining to privacy and security decision making It focuses on research on assisting individuals’ privacy and security choices with soft paternalistic interventions that nudge users toward more beneficial choices The article discusses potential benefits of those interventions, highlights their shortcomings, and identifies key ethical, design, and research challenges

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3054926

Nudges for Privacy and Security: Understanding and Assisting Users’ Choices Online

Notifying users about a system's data practices is supposed to enable users to make informed privacy decisions. Yet, current notice and choice mechanisms, such as privacy policies, are often ineffective because they are neither usable nor useful, and are therefore ignored by users. Constrained interfaces on mobile devices, wearables, and smart home devices connected in an Internet of Things exacerbate the issue. Much research has studied usability issues of privacy notices and many proposals for more usable privacy notices exist. Yet, there is little guidance for designers and developers on the design aspects that can impact the effectiveness of privacy notices. In this paper, we make multiple contributions to remedy this issue. We survey the existing literature on privacy notices and identify challenges, requirements, and best practices for privacy notice design. Further, we map out the design space for privacy notices by identifying relevant dimensions. This provides a taxonomy and consistent terminology of notice approaches to foster understanding and reasoning about notice options available in the context of specific systems. Our systemization of knowledge and the developed design space can help designers, developers, and researchers identify notice and choice requirements and develop a comprehensive notice concept for their system that addresses the needs of different audiences and considers the system's limitations and opportunities for providing notice.

/pdf/a-design-space-for-effective-privacy-notices-i3j34990y3.pdf

A design space for effective privacy notices

Social networking site users must decide what content to share and with whom. Many social networks, including Facebook, provide tools that allow users to selectively share content or block people from viewing content. However, sometimes instead of targeting a particular audience, users will self-censor, or choose not to share. We report the results from an 18-participant user study designed to explore self-censorship behavior as well as the subset of unshared content participants would have potentially shared if they could have specifically targeted desired audiences. We asked participants to report all content they thought about sharing but decided not to share on Facebook and interviewed participants about why they made sharing decisions and with whom they would have liked to have shared or not shared. Participants reported that they would have shared approximately half the unshared content if they had been able to exactly target their desired audiences.

/pdf/the-post-that-wasn-t-exploring-self-censorship-on-facebook-3ij090pne7.pdf

The post that wasn't: exploring self-censorship on facebook

Today's smartphone applications expect users to make decisions about what information they are willing to share, but fail to provide sufficient feedback about which privacy-sensitive information is leaving the phone, as well as how frequently and with which entities it is being shared. Such feedback can improve users' understanding of potential privacy leakages through apps that collect information about them in an unexpected way. Through a qualitative lab study with 19 participants, we first discuss misconceptions that smartphone users currently have with respect to two popular game applications that frequently collect the phone's current location and share it with multiple third parties. To measure the gap between users' understanding and actual privacy leakages, we use two types of interfaces that we developed: just-in-time notifications that appear the moment data is shared and a visualization that summarizes the shared data. We then report on participants' perceived benefits and concerns regarding data sharing with smartphone applications after experiencing notifications and having viewed the visualization. We conclude with a discussion on how heightened awareness of users and usable controls can mitigate some of these concerns.

/pdf/little-brothers-watching-you-raising-awareness-of-data-leaks-15q99q0vt9.pdf

"Little brothers watching you": raising awareness of data leaks on smartphones

We present results of a 45-participant laboratory study investigating the usability of nine tools to limit online behavioral advertising (OBA). We interviewed participants about OBA and recorded their behavior and attitudes as they configured and used a privacy tool, such as a browser plugin that blocks requests to specific URLs, a tool that sets browser cookies indicating a user's preference to opt out of OBA, or the privacy settings built into a web browser. We found serious usability flaws in all tools we tested. Participants found many tools difficult to configure, and tools' default settings were often minimally protective. Ineffective communication, confusing interfaces, and a lack of feedback led many participants to conclude that a tool was blocking OBA when they had not properly configured it to do so. Without being familiar with many advertising companies and tracking technologies, it was difficult for participants to use the tools effectively.

/pdf/why-johnny-can-t-opt-out-a-usability-evaluation-of-tools-to-2xv8vp5kit.pdf

Rebecca Balebako

Papers

Nudges for Privacy and Security: Understanding and Assisting Users’ Choices Online

A design space for effective privacy notices

The post that wasn't: exploring self-censorship on facebook

"Little brothers watching you": raising awareness of data leaks on smartphones

Why Johnny can't opt out: a usability evaluation of tools to limit online behavioral advertising