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Used, Avoided, Restricted? Perceptions, Behavior, and Changes in Video Conferencing of German-speaking Users During and After the Pandemic

Published: 20 November 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic required a sudden deployment of video conferencing (VC) in work and social environments. A few months after contact restrictions were lifted, we conducted an exploratory online survey with 251 German-speaking participants and investigated perceptions, behavior, and changes in the use of VC apps. Particularly, we considered security, privacy, usability, and familiarity of ten popular VC apps and how these factors influenced behavior during and after the lockdown. We showed significant dependencies between the usability and security perception of ten well-known VC apps. While perceived usability was significantly correlated with familiarity in most cases, we were only able to show a connection between familiarity and security perception for some of these applications. Usability played the greatest role in deciding to use an app. Yet, depending on the app, security had a significant influence as well. A lack of usability and security also played an important role in the avoidance of apps, but the influence of third-party decisions to restrict the use was the most significant. A lack of autonomy in app usage sometimes led to the use of apps that were associated with security concerns. In some cases, uncomfortable experiences and incidents triggered by the incorrect use of functions, e.g., activating audio by mistake, led to more extensive protective measures. Participants generally perceived threats from other attendees as more realistic than from external attackers.

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  1. Used, Avoided, Restricted? Perceptions, Behavior, and Changes in Video Conferencing of German-speaking Users During and After the Pandemic

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        EuroUSEC '24: Proceedings of the 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security
        September 2024
        361 pages
        ISBN:9798400717963
        DOI:10.1145/3688459
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Published: 20 November 2024

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        Author Tags

        1. video conferencing
        2. UCC
        3. UC
        4. online meeting
        5. privacy
        6. security
        7. usability
        8. user study
        9. survey

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        EuroUSEC 2024: The 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security
        September 30 - October 1, 2024
        Karlstad, Sweden

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