An Exploration of Public Reaction to the OPM Data Breach Notifications

摘要

With the number of data breaches swelling, people are likely to not respond adequately and ignore the breach notifications altogether. Ignorance of breach notifications creates a perfect storm of cyclical outrage and apathy that criminals can use to their advantage. In this research-in-progress paper, we explore public reactions to breach notifications for addressing two research questions: (1) with more and more information related to the breach, do people become apathetic towards that breach? (2) at what point do people simply tune out information related to the breach? The results of the sentiment analysis show that public express anxiety when there is a fear of being affected by the breach, and public express anger when there are lack of measures to safeguard the data. Sadness is the most strongly expressed emotion in response to the severity of the breach. After the public has received sufficient details about the event, they start to tune out information related to the breach event.