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

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. Copyright 2005 ACM.