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What is Beautiful is Secure

Published:09 July 2022Publication History
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Abstract

Visual appeal has been shown to influence perceptions of usability and credibility, and we hypothesize that something similar is happening with user judgments of website security: What is beautiful is secure. Web certificates provide reliable information about a website’s level of security, presented in browser interfaces. Users should use this to inform their trust decisions online, but evidence from laboratory studies and real-world usage suggests that they do not. We conducted two studies—one in lab, and one online—in which participants view and interact with websites with high and low visual appeal, and various security levels, and then make security-related judgments. In both studies, participants consistently rated visually appealing websites as more secure, and indicated they would be more likely to enter sensitive information into visually appealing websites—even when they were less secure. Our results provide evidence that users rely on visual appeal when making security and trust decisions on websites. We discuss how these results may be used to help users.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
        ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security  Volume 25, Issue 4
        November 2022
        330 pages
        ISSN:2471-2566
        EISSN:2471-2574
        DOI:10.1145/3544004
        Issue’s Table of Contents

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        Publication History

        • Published: 9 July 2022
        • Online AM: 2 May 2022
        • Revised: 1 April 2022
        • Accepted: 1 April 2022
        • Received: 1 November 2021
        Published in tops Volume 25, Issue 4

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