by: Andrew Raij, Animikh Ghosh, Santosh Kumar, Mani Srivastava
Authors
Researchers!
Raij - University of South Florida
Ghosh - SETLabs
Kumar - University of Memphis
Srivastava - University of California
Presentation Venue
"CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2011. (Finally! A new venue!)
Summary
Study was conducted using sensor data in mobile devices to determine what level of risk users perceived about the information which could be gleaned from these sensors about themselves.
Hypothesis
Raij hypothesized that people would have a higher level of concern for information that could be released from a worn sensory study when they had observed a personal stake in the information to be released. Raij also wished to see what manipulations of data would increase/decrease concern for information.
Methods
A user study was conducted with two groups, a control group that took an information privacy survey, and the experiment group which wore sensory capturing devices for three consecutive days, took the privacy survey, saw the results from their sensory data, and then took the privacy survey again.
Results
Participants who took the survey had similar levels of concern as did participants who wore the sensor devices in their first survey. Concern rose drastically in the second survey when the participants saw what information about themselves could be derived from sensory information. Physical location did not display an increase in concern. It was suggested that this was because participants expected their location to be trackable by the very nature of the devices. Emotional states (stress) and conversation had the highest levels of concern, especially when coincided with time stamps because that allowed one to determine things such as who one was talking to and when they had a seizure.
Discussion
This study demonstrated to me that people probably don't think deeply enough about situations which they enter into. The participants with the sensory data were presented with disclosures before wearing the devices so they knew what could be obtained from the devices. I acknowledge that they did not understand the extent to which this information could be accrued, but things such as time stamps should have been recognizable as problems. The very good thing about this survey is that it allows us to now know for the future that such subtle cues can be used to gather information, and we as users should be more conscious of what information without abstractions we allow.
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