# Perspectives of Non-Expert Users on Cyber Security and Privacy: An Analysis of Online Discussions on Twitter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02156 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02156/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A BERT-Based Transfer Learning Approach for Hate Speech Detection in Online Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12574/) (2019)
- [Visualizing and Understanding the Effectiveness of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05620/) (2019)
- [Cost-Sensitive BERT for Generalisable Sentence Classification with Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11563/) (2020)
- [Processing Tweets for Cybersecurity Threat Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02072/) (2019)
- [(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01762/) (2021)
- [Cyberthreat Detection from Twitter using Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01127/) (2019)
- [User Perceptions of Smart Home IoT Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08182/) (2018)
- [A Longitudinal Analysis of the Public Perception of the Opportunities and Challenges of the Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00959/) (2018)
- [Attributes affecting user decision to adopt a Virtual Private Network (VPN) app](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06813/) (2020)
- [When Googling it doesn't work: The challenge of finding security advice for smart home devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03107/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning Approach for Arabic Offensive Language Detection System: BERT-Based Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03542/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learned, Lagged, LLM-splained: LLM Responses to End User Security Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14571/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current research on users` perspectives of cyber security and privacy related to traditional and smart devices at home is very active, but the focus is often more on specific modern devices such as mobile and smart IoT devices in a home context. In addition, most were based on smaller-scale empirical studies such as online surveys and interviews. We endeavour to fill these research gaps by conducting a larger-scale study based on a real-world dataset of 413,985 tweets posted by non-expert users on Twitter in six months of three consecutive years (January and February in 2019, 2020 and 2021). Two machine learning-based classifiers were developed to identify the 413,985 tweets. We analysed this dataset to understand non-expert users` cyber security and privacy perspectives, including the yearly trend and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We applied topic modelling, sentiment analysis and qualitative analysis of selected tweets in the dataset, leading to various interesting findings. For instance, we observed a 54% increase in non-expert users` tweets on cyber security and/or privacy related topics in 2021, compared to before the start of global COVID-19 lockdowns (January 2019 to February 2020). We also observed an increased level of help-seeking tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis revealed a diverse range of topics discussed by non-expert users across the three years, including VPNs, Wi-Fi, smartphones, laptops, smart home devices, financial security, and security and privacy issues involving different stakeholders. Overall negative sentiment was observed across almost all topics non-expert users discussed on Twitter in all the three years. Our results confirm the multi-faceted nature of non-expert users` perspectives on cyber security and privacy and call for more holistic, comprehensive and nuanced research on different facets of such perspectives.