ABSTRACT

It is considerably dicult to estimate the mass-user interest in a specic topic over time often due to the sensitivity of the self-reported data to bias such as privacy related surveys, which is a part of the privacy paradox. In 2015, Pew Research Center published a report discussing how the on-line activities and habits of American adults have changed since Edward Snowden began leaking documents about government intelligence programs [6]. Their survey identied how people changed their on-line behavior as they became aware of surveillance. These ndings indicate that revelations of privacy-invasive programs make people change their on-line behaviors to better protect their sensitive data. Privacy-related decision-making like this has been actively studied for some time with much of the research focusing on the privacy paradox" in which behavioral decisions seem at odds with reported preferences (see, for example, [2, 3]). In our work, we propose a novel methodology to measure the population's interest over time by creating a robust index based on on-line searches and leveraging of the search trends of the queries in this index. We verify our index-based process using the Pew Research Center report on the Snowden revelations.