PRISM - PRivacy-Sensitive Messaging

PRISM - PRivacy-Sensitive Messaging (Demo)
Student: Sameer Patil, UCI/ISR
Advisors: Alfred Kobsa, UCI/ISR, Hadar Ziv, UCI/ISR
Abstract: Instant Messaging (IM) is increasingly used as an awareness and communication tool for collaborative work. Awareness and communication aspects of IM are, however, inherently in tension with privacy. Presently, IM systems support privacy management through preference settings. These settings typically apply to everyone on one’s IM contact list. Given the situated and nuanced nature of privacy, global preferences are rather crude, and are usually inadequate for effective privacy management. Moreover, these privacy preferences are “one-way” in that they do not allow a user to negotiate, nor even know about, actions of other users that may be relevant to his or her privacy. We present PRISM, a plugin that overcomes these shortcomings by supporting fine-grained control, notification, negotiation, and in-situ adjustment for individual privacy-relevant preferences. PRISM supports situated privacy decision; preferences can be specified, modified, or (re)negotiated, as needed, anytime during an IM conversation. Additionally, PRISM allows a user to visualize activities of their contacts as a collective in order to support discovery of "norms" regarding IM usage.
Bio: Sameer Patil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has spent two summers as a Research Intern at I.B.M. T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. Prior to joining UCI, Sameer obtained Master's degrees in Computer Science & Engineering and Information from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering from University of Bombay, India. Sameer's research interests lie in the areas of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp).