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Who Gets to Know What When: Configuring Privacy Permissions in an Awareness Application

Abstract: The need achieving a balance between promoting awareness of activities of collaborators, and preserving the privacy of concerned individuals is a major challenge faced by designers of CSCW awareness systems. In order to empower users to achieve this balance, designers need better understanding of user privacy preferences. Towards this end, we conducted a study 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. I will present findings from the study along with their implications for designing awareness systems more sensitive to user preferences for privacy.

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 past 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).