Noticing Notice: A large-scale experiment on the timing of software license agreements

Spyware is an increasing problem. Interestingly, many programs carrying spyware honestly disclose the activities of the software, but users install the software anyway. We report on a study of software installation to assess the effectiveness of different notices for helping people make better decisions on which software to install. Our study of 222 users showed that providing a short summary notice, in addition to the End User License Agreement (EULA), before the installation reduced the number of software installations significantly. We also found that providing the short summary notice after installation led to a significant number of uninstalls. However, even with the short notices, many users installed the program and later expressed regret for doing so. These results, along with a detailed analysis of installation, regret, and survey data about user behaviors informs our recommendations to policymakers and designers for assessing the "adequacy" of consent in the context of software that exhibits behaviors associated with spyware.