The online world is an unrelenting mistress, with an almost constant attempt to lure us back into its embrace.  Even when we’re not actively doing things, many of the apps on our phone inform our contacts that we’re online. Fascinating new research from the University of Washington explores how this status update influences our behavior.

The researchers surveyed a number of smartphone users, and discovered that misunderstanding around our online status indicators was rife.  Despite this, the indicators still influenced how we behave, with the majority of respondents saying that they were conscious that others had noticed they were online, and a large number saying they had themselves logged on to see if friends were also online.

“Online status indicators are an unusual mechanism for broadcasting information about yourself to other people,” the researchers say. “When people share information by posting or liking something, the user is in control of that broadcast. But online status indicators are sharing information without taking explicit direction from the user. We believe our results are especially intriguing in light of the coronavirus pandemic: With people’s social lives completely online, what is the role of online status indicators?”

Online status

Participants were asked to identify all the apps they used from a list of 44 provided by the researchers, before being asked whether their apps broadcast their online status to their contacts.  The participants were typically able to correctly identify at least one app that did this, but they also typically missed at least one that did so without their knowledge.  Google Docs, for instance, was one commonly believed to not share one’s status, despite it doing so.

The volunteers were then tested to see how quickly they could find and update the settings that control their status privacy.  Worryingly, in over 25% of circumstances, volunteers gave up before they were able to do so, whilst they mistakenly thought they had done so in another 23% of circumstances.

“When you put some of these pieces together, you’re seeing that more than a third of the time, people think they’re not broadcasting information that they actually are,” the researchers say. “And then even when they’re told: ‘Please go try and turn this off,’ they’re still not able to find it more than a quarter of the time. Just broadly we’re seeing that people don’t have a lot of control over whether they share this information with their network.”

Lastly, the volunteers were asked about their experiences online, including how often they noticed the status of others and whether others noticed their own status.

“We see this repeated pattern of people adjusting themselves to meet the demands of technology — as opposed to technology adapting to us and meeting our needs,” the researchers explain. “That means people are choosing to go online not because they want to do something there but because it’s important that their status indicator is projecting the right thing at the right time.”