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Designing for privacy and self-presentation in social awareness

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Abstract

Social awareness applications are based on the idea of a group sharing real-time context information via personal and ubiquitous terminals. Studies of such applications have shown that users are not only concerned with the preservation privacy through non-disclosure. Instead, disclosure is manipulated for the constant presentation of self to the group in everyday social situations. Basing on 3 years of research with the mobile social awareness system ContextContacts, established findings in social psychology and ubiquitous computing, we propose a number of design principles to support users in this management of privacy and presentation. These principles are to apply even if disclosure is automated, and include support for lightweight permissions, assuming reciprocity, appearing differently to different audiences, providing for feedback on presentation and allowing lying. These principles are applied in interaction design and protocol engineering for the next version of a mobile awareness system called ContextContacts.

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Notes

  1. Some of the interaction design ideas were presented in an earlier workshop paper [13], but the analytical structure is completely new.

  2. The first three studies have been reported in detail in Oulasvirta et al. [28]. The latest study has not been fully analyzed, but we will give preliminary results based on interview data. The existing reports have mostly skimmed the privacy aspects, which we will focus on here.

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  4. http://www.aim.com/.

  5. http://www.icq.com/.

  6. http://www.plazes.com/.

  7. http://www.dodgeball.com/.

  8. http://www.proxidating.com/.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by the Academy of Finland under the PROACT research programme, and by the Helsinki Graduate School in Computer Science and Engineering. We thank Antti Salovaara, Sakari Tamminen, Marko Turpeinen, Louise Barkhuus and Markus Bylund for commenting on drafts of the paper and Kliment Yanev for comments on the protocol design section.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, PO Box 68, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Mika Raento

  2. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, PO Box 9800, 02015, TKK, Finland

    Mika Raento & Antti Oulasvirta

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  1. Mika Raento
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  2. Antti Oulasvirta
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Correspondence to Mika Raento.

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Raento, M., Oulasvirta, A. Designing for privacy and self-presentation in social awareness. Pers Ubiquit Comput 12, 527–542 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-008-0200-9

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