Out of the Loop: How Automated Software Updates Cause Unintended Security Consequences

When security updates are not installed, or installed slowly, end users are at an increased risk for harm. To improve security, soft-ware designers have endeavored to remove the user from the soft-ware update loop. However, user involvement in software updates remains necessary; not all updates are wanted, and required reboots can negatively impact users. We used a multi-method approach to collect interview, survey, and computer log data from 37 Windows 7 users. We compared what the users think is happening on their computers (interview and survey data), what users want to happen on their computer (interview and survey data), and what was actu-ally going on (log data). We found that 28 out of our 37 participants had a misunderstanding about what was happening on their com-puter, and that over half of the participants could not execute their intentions for computer management. 1