Now University of Washington researchers have defined for the first time what children mean when they say technology is “creepy.” Kids in a new study described creepy technology as something that is unpredictable or poses an ambiguous threat that might cause physical harm or threaten an important relationship. The researchers also pinpointed five aspects of emerging technologies that could contribute to this feeling of ambiguity.

The team presented its results May 8 at the 2019 ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Over the years of working with kids we realized they use the word ‘creepy’ a lot as a way to reject specific technologies,” said first author Jason Yip, an assistant professor in the UW’s Information School. “But kids have a difficult time articulating what makes something creepy. So we designed a series of activities to give them the chance to work out their own thoughts and help us understand.”

Previous research indicated that adults describe ambiguous threats as creepy, not scary, so the team conducted four separate design sessions to see if children felt similarly about creepy technology. These sessions had 11 children aged 7 to 11 prototype their own technologies or rank real or imagined technologies as “creepy,” “not creepy” or “don’t know.” Devices that could bring about physical harm or disrupt an important relationship were most consistently ranked as being creepy.

“When we were brainstorming about what kids were going to be worried about, we never considered that they might be concerned that somehow technology would get between them and their parents, and that this would be such a salient issue in their minds,” said co-author Alexis Hiniker, an assistant professor in the iSchool.

The team found five properties of technology that lead to those fears:

Deception versus transparency

Kids want to understand how technology works and what information a device is collecting. For example, when a child asked a digital voice assistant if it would kill him in his sleep and it said, “I can’t answer that,” the child was concerned.

“‘I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to that’ works well if I ask how many hairs are on the top of my head,” Yip said. “But with these types of questions, this response sounds deceptive.”

Ominous physical appearance

Kids are sensitive to how a technology looks, sounds and feels. But that doesn’t mean that only traditionally scary-looking technologies are creepy: The children were also wary of Maslo, an app with a large black dot as its interface, because it looked like a “black spirit” or a “black hole.”

Lack of control

Kids want to control technology’s access to their information and the flow of that information to their parents. For example, when kids were asked to design a technology that was trustworthy, some of the children designed an intelligent trash can that both scanned and deleted their facial recognition data each time they used it. Their trash can also had a button that allowed for manual deletion of data.

Unpredictability

Kids don’t like it when technology does things unexpectedly, like automatically knowing their name or laughing. To kids, laughing could communicate hidden, and possibly malicious, intent.

Mimicry

Kids also don’t like technology that pretends to be something else, especially when it’s trying to mimic people in their lives or themselves. Technology that mimics them could be trying to steal their identities or disrupting family relationships.

“All five themes are related to ambiguous threats. It’s a not specific monstrosity coming after them here like when something is scary; it’s more nuanced so that they’re not sure of the consequences of their actions,” Yip said. “The kids kept referencing the movie Coraline. In the story, the dolls ask Coraline to make a change: ‘If you sew buttons over your eyes and become just like us, we will love you forever.’ That prompts this feeling of, ‘Wait a second, sew buttons over my eyes? What am I compromising here?'”

The team found that trusted adults had some influence over whether or not the children thought that specific devices were creepy. For example, one child deemed smartphones “not creepy” because he saw his parents using them. Another kid thought that laptops were creepy because his parents taped a piece of paper over the camera to “keep the robbers away.”

The researchers acknowledge that their results could be used to make technology that tricks kids into a false sense of security. But the team thinks it is more important to have these results available to the public to help parents talk to their kids about technology and any types of fears that might arise.

“Children have access to so many different kinds of technologies compared to when we were growing up,” Hiniker said. “But their basic fears haven’t changed at all. Kids want to feel physically safe and anchored to trusted adults who are going to protect them.”

The findings also extend to the stock market, where a company’s stock price can be influenced by the size of the breach when the news coverage emphasizes fear, rather than anger.

“The emotions of fear and anger will elicit different reactions,” said Subimal Chatterjee, distinguished professor in marketing at Binghamton University’s School of Management. “In the wake of a data breach, we wanted to explore those different reactions and see if people acted to protect themselves or directed feelings toward those responsible.”

Chatterjee partnered with faculty across multiple disciplines within the School of Management. Working with Sumantra Sarkar, assistant professor of management information systems, Cihan Uzmanoglu, assistant professor of finance, and Xiang Gao, a Binghamton University PhD alumnus now at the Paseka School of Business at Minnesota State University, the group conducted three studies to get to their findings.

“So much business is now conducted online, and while that provides many conveniences, it opens up new threats. Data breaches are constantly in the news, and the scope of some of these breaches are huge,” Sarkar said. “When you hear that millions of people may be impacted, how do you react?”

Two of the studies surveyed how consumers reacted to the scope of a data breach. They found that only the customers who felt fear after a breach were sensitive to the size and scope of the breach, while scope didn’t matter to angry consumers.

“Fearful consumers were sensitive to knowing, for example, if the breach only affected 100 customers or 10 million customers, and we found that the larger the scope, the larger the reaction,” said Chatterjee. “Meanwhile, angry consumers didn’t care if it was 10 customers or 10 million customers. Their focus wasn’t on the scope. They were directing their focus and anger on the perpetrator.”

The findings suggest that among consumers who are fearful, the larger the breach the more likely they are to think that they are at risk. And the threat becomes more vivid to them as the scope of the breach increases.

“Consumers may often find themselves imaging the worst-case scenario when these large-scale data breaches happen. Is my information safe? Is my credit card information being used by the hackers? These images will help determine whether they’ll ever make a purchase from that company again,” said Chatterjee.

A third study examined 12,000 news stories about data breaches. Testing for keywords that suggested either a fearful or angry response in the coverage, the researchers then compared the findings to stock prices for affected companies at the time of the coverage.

They found that the stock market reacts similarly to how consumers react: Fear makes the stock market sensitive to the scope of a data breach, while anger makes the stock market insensitive to the scope of a data breach.

“The intuition is that changes in stock prices should reveal the underlying consumer reactions to news of data breaches,” said Uzmanoglu. “Using this approach, we show that data breaches that affect more customers are associated with more negative stock returns, and that this effect primarily comes from data breaches that trigger emotions of fear rather than anger.”

Easing fears in the wake of a data breach should be a priority, the researchers said.

“From day one, you need to let your customers know that you are on top of this and move to ease those fears they may have. You don’t want them picturing that worst-case scenario,” said Chatterjee.

Researchers say this could mean clarifying your company’s disaster recovery plans, training customers on the basics of data security, or offering free services such as credit monitoring or fraud protection services.

The researchers also recommend being extra careful about how you communicate the scope of the data breach, as fearful customers will be very sensitive to the size of breaches.

“If you have 500 million customers that were affected by a breach, but it only represents around 16 percent of your customer base, you may want to focus on that smaller number in your communications to minimize the threat to fearful customers,” Chatterjee said.

“This discovery may enable us to provide families with additional information,” said lead author Galen Wright, a research associate in the UBC faculty of medicine, CMMT and BC Children’s. “It could also potentially improve disease management by providing genetic counsellors with valuable data in the future.”

Huntington disease is an inherited disorder that affects one in approximately 7,000 Canadians. For every affected person, there are four to five individuals that carry the gene mutation that causes the disease, but are not yet ill. The disease often begins around age 40. Symptoms include motor, cognitive and psychiatric changes.

Huntington disease is caused by a single mutation in the huntingtin gene, where patients carry an expanded stretch of repetitive DNA. While the length of this mutation has long been regarded as the greatest indicator of when (and whether) an individual will exhibit symptoms of the disease, researchers at UBC have uncovered a genetic variant that also significantly influences age of onset in patients.

“Our study reveals that age of onset in Huntington disease is influenced not only by the length of the expansion mutation, but also by the DNA sequence directly adjacent to this repetitive sequence,” said senior author Dr. Michael Hayden, a Killam professor of medical genetics and director emeritus for the CMMT, which is part of the faculty of medicine at UBC and located at BC Children’s.

This is the key finding in a new study published today in the American Journal of Human Genetics. While previous studies of the huntingtin gene have focused on the length of the string of glutamine building blocks in the DNA of the gene, this study examined variants in the DNA sequence encoding for these glutamine building blocks and the relationship between these variants and the age of onset of the disease.

The DNA sequence that causes Huntington disease is primarily made up of repeats of three letters of DNA, CAG, which encode the protein building block, glutamine. But UBC researchers have shown that the presence of another glutamine building block, CAA, significantly impacts the disease. In individuals where the CAA sequence is replaced with a CAG sequence, patients were found to present with the disorder decades earlier than expected, despite carrying an identical number of glutamine amino acids.

“Now we know that the age of onset in Huntington disease is significantly impacted by the length of uninterrupted CAG sequence,” said Hayden.

The length of uninterrupted CAG sequence also appears to contribute to somatic instability.

The researchers screened samples from patients in the UBC Huntington disease biobank for the variant in the huntingtin gene, to examine age of onset and whether the mutation was more likely to expand to longer repeat lengths in the blood. Hayden established this bank — which now contains approximately 8,000 specimens — in 1986 in an effort to conduct such studies.

Hayden’s team hopes to screen additional DNA samples to further refine age of onset prediction models for people from families with Huntington disease with this variant, and to look at how these variants express themselves in brain tissue.

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Materials provided by University of British Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.