How Language Formality in Security and Privacy Interfaces Impacts Intended Compliance

Strong end-user security practices benefit both the user and hosting platform, but it is not well understood how companies communicate with their users to encourage these practices. This paper explores whether web companies and their platforms use different levels of language formality in these communications and tests the hypothesis that higher language formality leads to users’ increased intention to comply. We contribute a dataset and systematic analysis of 1,817 English language strings in web security and privacy interfaces across 13 web platforms, showing strong variations in language. An online study with 512 participants further demonstrated that people perceive differences in the language formality across platforms and that a higher language formality is associated with higher self-reported intention to comply. Our findings suggest that formality can be an important factor in designing effective security and privacy prompts. We discuss implications of these results, including how to balance formality with platform language style. In addition to being the first piece of work to analyze language formality in user security, these findings provide valuable insights into how platforms can best communicate with users about account security.