User Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Untraceability in Messaging Platforms

Abstract

Mainstream messaging platforms offer a variety of features designed to enhance user privacy, such as password-protected chats and end-to-end encryption, which primarily protect message contents. Beyond contents, a lot can be inferred about people simply by tracing who sends and receives messages, when, and how often. This paper explores user perceptions of and attitudes toward "untraceability", defined as preventing third parties from tracing who communicates with whom, to inform the design of privacy-enhancing technologies and untraceable communication protocols. Through a vignette-based qualitative study with 189 participants, we identify a diverse set of features that users perceive to be useful for untraceable messaging, ranging from using aliases instead of real names to VPNs. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we uncover three overarching attitudes that influence the support or rejection of untraceability in messaging platforms and that can serve as a set of new privacy personas: privacy fundamentalists, who advocate for privacy as a universal right; safety fundamentalists, who support surveillance for the sake of accountability; and optimists, who advocate for privacy in principle but also endorse exceptions in idealistic ways, such as encryption backdoors. We highlight a critical gap between the threat models assumed by users and those addressed by untraceable communication protocols. Many participants understood untraceability as a form of anonymity, but interpret it as senders and receivers hiding their identities from each other, rather than from external network observers. We discuss implications for design of strategic communication and user interfaces of untraceable messaging protocols, and propose framing untraceability as a form of "altruistic privacy", i.e., adopting privacy-enhancing technologies to protect others, as a promising strategy to foster broad adoption.