Techniques for addressing fundamental privacy and disruption tradeoffs in awareness support systems

Abstract

This paper describes a fundamental dual tradeoff that occurs in systems supporting awareness for distributed work groups, and presents several specific new techniques which illustrate good compromise points within this tradeoff space. This dual tradeoff is between privacy and awareness, and between awareness and disturbance. Simply stated, the more information about oneself that leaves your work area, the more potential for awareness of you exists for your colleagues. Unfortunately, this also represents the greatest potential for intrusion on your privacy.Similarly, the more information that is received about the activities of colleagues, the more potential awareness we have of them. However, at the same time, the more information we receive, the greater the chance that the information will become a disturbance to our normal work.This dual tradeoff seems to be a fundamental one. However, by carefully examining awareness problems in the light of this tradeoff it is possible to devise techniques which expose new points in the design space. These new points provide different types and quantities of information so that awareness can be achieved without invading the privacy of the sender, or creating a disturbance for the receiver. This paper presents four such techniques, each based on a careful selection of the information transmitted.

Achieving Anonymity against Major Face Recognition Algorithms

“…the eyes) or blurring or pixelation of faces [7,17,20,36] were eventually tested. However, these methods are visually intrusive and target human and algorithmic recognition alike.…”

Supporting young children's communication with adult relatives across time zones

“…To make sure that it could be seen from further away than just in front of the monitor, the indicator was implemented as a traffic light, The traffic light would be green if the other household had their system turned on, otherwise red. In some situations, showing information about another household's activities in this way could be considered an invasion of privacy, albeit an inevitable one, because if "one person in the media space [is] to have richer awareness, others must necessarily have less privacy" (Hudson & Smith, 1996). However, since research on communication between distributed family members has found that in general privacy is something their participants "did not seem too concerned about" (Tee at el., 2009), this was not deemed a major issue here.…”

Early experience with the mediaspace CoMedi

“…Other techniques for filtering private video scenes have been developed recently: a low resolution image as in the Nynex Porthole (Lee, 1997), a ghost that denotes moving entities over time while blurring the entity itself (Hudson , 1996).…”