IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 82

Cost is the most important factor
influencing the decision to acquire
an accountability tool or not.

lesson learned for accountability tool developers is the
realization that cloud users will not indefinitely buy all
accountability tools and that they might be skeptical
about certain characteristics of an accountability tool
that from an accountability perspective are valued
more highly.

Author Information
American population Internet-using population with
an increased international character, including an
increased number of young, male, Indian Mechanical
Turkers, but not the European population [10], [11].
However, most of our respondents are well educated
and can be regarded as making conscious choices
representative of the general public.
A bias specifically related to the CBC methodology is that the choices made in a design like this
remain hypothetical. In other words, an unknown
gap remains between the choices respondents made
in this experiment, and the actual choices they will
make in reality. Still, experiments like this do provide
a much-needed approximation of the actual decisions
people would make and of their priorities. One important difference between this experiment and reality
is the fact that the decision tasks presented here are
isolated decisions. In reality, many variables play a
role in actual decisions that have not been taken into
account here.
Take for example, the storage space of the cloud service, the reputation, and other factors that might affect
the popularity of a cloud service. Each of these factors
will also affect the decision to choose one service over
another. On the other hand, by isolating transparency
tools, as is done here, we were able to provide detailed
information regarding preferences.
Also the importance percentages were taken from
the average utilities, and not the utility per respondent.
This could lead to bias due to insensitivity to the fact
that some attributes may be desired by half of the
respondents, whereas another by the other half (see
[14]). In addition, the audience attribute might play a bigger role than we were able to analyze.
Nevertheless, the CBC experiment has sketched a
strong and nuanced picture of the different elements
informing choices people make when seeking tools to
provide insight about the whereabouts of their data and
steer accountable behavior in the cloud. The results
offer valuable insights into individuals' willingness to
pay for accountability, i.e., in the form of a transparency tool. Moreover, this CBC experiment is, to our
knowledge, the first ever performed with respect to
accountability tools in the cloud. The most important

The authors are with Tilburg University, Tilburg Institute
for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT), P.O. Box 90153,
5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. Email: wsteijn@gmail.
com; M.G.H.Niezen@uvt.nl.

Acknowledgment
The research leading to these results received funding
from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no:
317550 The Cloud Accountability Project (A4Cloud).

References

[1] S. Pearson. "Toward accountability in the Cloud," IEEE Internet
Computing, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 64-69, Jun. 24, 2011.
[2] S. Pearson and A. Charlesworth, "Accountability as a way forward
for privacy protection in the Cloud," in Cloud Computing, vol. 5931,
M. G. Jaatun, G. Zhao, and C. Rong, Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer
Berlin Heidelberg, 2009, pp. 131-144.
[3] S. Pearson, "Privacy management in global organisations," in
Proc. 13th Joint IFIP TC6 and TC11 Conf. Communications and
Multimedia Security (CMS 2012), 2012, vol. 7394, pp. 217-237.
[4] C. Raab, "The meaning of the word 'accountability' in the information privacy context," in Managing Privacy through Accountability, 2012, p. 15.
[5] R. Mulgan, "Comparing accountability in the public and private
sectors," Aust. J. Public Adm., vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 87-97, 2000.
[6] M.G.H. Niezen and W.M.P. Steijn, "Cloud's social implications
and the need for accountability by individual cloud users," Tilburg,
2014.
[7] M. G. Jaatun, S. Pearson, F. Gittler, and R. Leenes, "Towards
strong accountability for Cloud service providers," in Proc. Cloud
Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2014 IEEE 6th
Int. Conf., 2014, pp. 1001-1006.
[8] P.E. Green, A.M. Krieger, and Y. Wind, "Thirty years of conjoint
analysis: Reflections and prospects," Interfaces, vol. 31, no. 3_supplement, pp. S56-S73, 2001.
[9] G. Paolacci, J. Chandler, and P. G. Ipeirotis, "Running experiments on amazon mechanical turk," Judgm. Decis. Mak., vol. 5, no.
5, pp. 411-419, 2010.
[10] P. G. Ipeirotis, "Analyzing the amazon mechanical turk marketplace,"
XRDS Crossroads ACM Mag. Stud., vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 16-21, 2010.
[11] J. Ross, L. Irani, M. Silberman, A. Zaldivar, and B. Tomlinson,
"Who are the crowdworkers?: Shifting demographics in Mechanical
Turk," presented at CHI'10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010, pp. 2863-2872.
[12] Sawtooth Software, "Manuel CBC/HB v5 Software for Hierarchical
Bayes Estimation for CBC Data." Sawtooth Software, 2013.
[13] J. Prufer, "How to govern the Cloud? Characterizing the optimal enforcement institution that supports accountability in Cloud
computing," in Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), Proc. 2013 IEEE 5th Int. Conf., 2013, vol. 2, pp. 33-38.
[14] B.K. Orme, "Menu-based choice modeling using traditional
tools," in Sawtooth Software Conf. Proc., Sequim, WA, 2010.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

∕

December 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015