Using Personal Data to Support Authentication: User Attitudes and Suitability

Dynamic personal data based on a user’s activity, such as recent visited physical locations, browsing history, and call logs, update frequently, making it a promising token for user authentication. However, it is not clear how users perceive this use of personal data and which data types are most suitable for authentication. To investigate this, we conducted an online survey with N=100 participants. For 10 personal data types we asked participants about their comfort with this data for authentication, its perceived security, its impact on behaviour, who has access to it, how frequently it updates, and how memorable they perceive it to be. We found that participants were generally uncomfortable with personal data being used for authentication and, knowing their personal data is used, they may intentionally change their behaviour due to privacy concerns. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using personal data as a source of dynamic tokens to complement authentication and conclude with three learned lessons.