  Data dashboards are designed to help users manage data collected about them.
However, prior work showed that exposure to some dashboards, notably Google's
My Activity dashboard, results in significant decreases in perceived concern
and increases in perceived benefit from data collection, contrary to
expectations. We theorize that this result is due to the fact that data
dashboards currently do not sufficiently "connect the dots" of the data food
chain, that is, by connecting data collection with the use of that data. To
evaluate this, we designed a study where participants assigned advertising
interest labels to their own real activities, effectively acting as a
behavioral advertising engine to "connect the dots." When comparing pre- and
post-labeling task responses, we find no significant difference in concern with
Google's data collection practices, which indicates that participants' priors
are maintained after more exposure to the data food chain (differing from prior
work), suggesting that data dashboards that offer deeper perspectives of how
data collection is used have potential. However, these gains are offset when
participants are exposed to their true interest labels inferred by Google.
Concern for data collection dropped significantly as participants viewed
Google's labeling as generic compared to their own more specific labeling. This
presents a possible new paradox that must be overcome when designing data
dashboards, the generic paradox, which occurs when users misalign individual,
generic inferences from collected data as benign compared to the totality and
specificity of many generic inferences made about them.
