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Who gets to know what when: configuring privacy permissions in an awareness application

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We report on a study (N=36) of user preferences for balancing awareness with privacy. Participants defined permissions for sharing of location, availability, calendar information and instant messaging (IM) activity within an application called mySpace. MySpace is an interactive visualization of the physical workplace that provides dynamic information about people, places and equipment. We found a significant preference for defining privacy permissions at the group level. While "family" received high levels of awareness sharing, interestingly, "team" was granted comparable levels during business hours at work. Surprisingly, presenting participants with a detailed list of all pieces of personal context to which the system had access, did not result in more conservative privacy settings. Although location was the most sensitive aspect of awareness, participants were comfortable disclosing room-level location information to their team members at work. Our findings suggest utilizing grouping mechanisms to balance privacy control with configuration burden, and argue for increased system transparency to build trust.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2005
    928 pages
    ISBN:1581139985
    DOI:10.1145/1054972
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    Published: 02 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. awareness
    2. context-aware computing
    3. contextual communication
    4. information disclosure
    5. permission structures
    6. privacy

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    • (2022)Because I’m Restricted, 2 – 4 PM Unable to See Messages: Exploring Users’ Perceptions and Likely Practices around Exposing Attention Management Use on IM Online StatusProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517616(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • (2022)Rethinking Activity Awareness: The Design, Evaluation and Implication of Integrating Activity Awareness into Mobile MessagingInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2022.215490440:9(2239-2253)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2022
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