Attention Please: Your Attention Check Questions in Survey Studies Can Be Automatically Answered

Attention check questions have become commonly used in online surveys published on popular crowdsourcing platforms as a key mechanism to filter out inattentive respondents and improve data quality. However, little research considers the vulnerabilities of this important quality control mechanism that can allow attackers including irresponsible and malicious respondents to automatically answer attention check questions for efficiently achieving their goals. In this paper, we perform the first study to investigate such vulnerabilities, and demonstrate that attackers can leverage deep learning techniques to pass attention check questions automatically. We propose AC-EasyPass, an attack framework with a concrete model, that combines convolutional neural network and weighted feature reconstruction to easily pass attention check questions. We construct the first attention check question dataset that consists of both original and augmented questions, and demonstrate the effectiveness of AC-EasyPass. We explore two simple defense methods, adding adversarial sentences and adding typos, for survey designers to mitigate the risks posed by AC-EasyPass; however, these methods are fragile due to their limitations from both technical and usability perspectives, underlining the challenging nature of defense. We hope our work will raise sufficient attention of the research community towards developing more robust attention check mechanisms. More broadly, our work intends to prompt the research community to seriously consider the emerging risks posed by the malicious use of machine learning techniques to the quality, validity, and trustworthiness of crowdsourcing and social computing.