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'It's like if you opened someone else's letter': user perceived privacy and social practices with SMS communication

Published: 19 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a study examining users' perceptions of privacy relating to mobile phone usage, and more specifically on the use of short message service (SMS) messages. The study also looks at the reasons for mobile phone ownership, and user perceptions on possibilities for added privacy with mobile messaging communication. The user study consisted of a written survey of 119 people and ten interviews. Results confirm that most respondents feel mobile phones are private and personal devices, and that SMS messages are perceived as more private than normal calls. This research found user privacy is guarded by widely accepted, unwritten rules of treating phones and messages as confidential.

References

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Berg, S., Taylor, A.S., and Harper, R. Mobile Phones for the Next Generation: Device Design for Teenagers. CHI Letters, 2003, 5 (1), 433--440.
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Grinter, R.E., and Eldridge, M. y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg? In Seventh European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work ECSCW'01. 2001. Bonn, Germany.
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Ling, R., and Yttri, B. "Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring:" Micro and hyper-coordination through the use of the mobile telephone. 1999, Telenor Research & Development, Norway.
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Palen, L., Salsman, M. and Youngs, E. Discovery and Integration of Mobile Communications in Everyday Life. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5, 2001, 109--122.
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Smailagic, A., Siewioredk, D.P., Anhalt, J., Kogan, D., and Wang, Y. Location Sensing and Privacy in a Context Aware Computing Environment. In Pervasive Computing. 2001.

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  1. 'It's like if you opened someone else's letter': user perceived privacy and social practices with SMS communication

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    MobileHCI '05: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices & services
    September 2005
    400 pages
    ISBN:1595930892
    DOI:10.1145/1085777
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 19 September 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. messaging
    2. mobile communications
    3. privacy

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 202 of 906 submissions, 22%

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    • (2015)Texting: Its Uses, Misuses, and EffectsEncyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior10.4018/978-1-4666-8239-9.ch099(1214-1241)Online publication date: 2015
    • (2015)Communication Privacy Management and Mobile Phone UseEncyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior10.4018/978-1-4666-8239-9.ch075(924-936)Online publication date: 2015
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