Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

Understanding Bystanders’ Tendency to Shoulder Surf Smartphones Using 360-Degree Videos in Virtual Reality

Author(s):

Saad, Alia; Liebers, Jonathan; Gruenefeld, Uwe; Alt, Florian; Schneegass, Stefan

Title of Anthology:

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI)

Publisher:

Association for Computing Machinery

Location(s):

Toulouse, France

Publication Date:

2021

ISBN:

9781450383288

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.1145/3447526.3472058

Citation:

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Abstract

Shoulder surfing is an omnipresent risk for smartphone users. However, investigating these attacks in the wild is difficult because of either privacy concerns, lack of consent, or the fact that asking for consent would influence people’s behavior (e.g., they could try to avoid looking at smartphones). Thus, we propose utilizing 360-degree videos in Virtual Reality (VR), recorded in staged real-life situations on public transport. Despite differences between perceiving videos in VR and experiencing real-world situations, we believe this approach to allow novel insights on observers’ tendency to shoulder surf another person’s phone authentication and interaction to be gained. By conducting a study (N=16), we demonstrate that a better understanding of shoulder surfers’ behavior can be obtained by analyzing gaze data during video watching and comparing it to post-hoc interview responses. On average, participants looked at the phone for about 11% of the time it was visible and could remember half of the applications used.