Dancing Pigs - Origins

Origins

The term has its origin in a remark by Edward Felten and Gary McGraw:

“

Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.

”

Bruce Schneier expands on this remark as follows:

If J. Random Websurfer clicks on a button that promises dancing pigs on his computer monitor, and instead gets a hortatory message describing the potential dangers of the applet — he's going to choose dancing pigs over computer security any day. If the computer prompts him with a warning screen like: "The applet DANCING PIGS could contain malicious code that might do permanent damage to your computer, steal your life's savings, and impair your ability to have children," he'll click OK without even reading it. Thirty seconds later he won't even remember that the warning screen even existed.

The Mozilla Security Reviewers' Guide states:

Many of our potential users are inexperienced computer users, who do not understand the risks involved in using interactive Web content. This means we must rely on the user's judgement as little as possible.

A widely-publicized 2009 paper directly addresses the dancing pigs quotation and argues that users' behavior is plausibly rational:

While amusing, this is unfair: users are never offered security, either on its own or as an alternative to anything else. They are offered long, complex and growing sets of advice, mandates, policy updates and tips. These sometimes carry vague and tentative suggestions of reduced risk, never security.