2005/04/02 by Sameer Patil, Jennifer C. Lai · 139 citations
Social Sciences · Decision Sciences · Computer Science · #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Personal Information Management and User Behavior #Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing #Transparency (behavior) #Internet privacy #Computer science #Context (archaeology) #Instant messaging #Preference #Information sharing #Work (physics) #Personally identifiable information #World Wide Web #Computer security
paper · doi:10.1145/1054972.1054987
openalex publication_date 2005/04/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
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.