Improving availability awareness with relationship filtering

Abstract

Awareness servers provide information about a person to help observers determine whether a person is available for contact. A trade -off exists in these systems: more sources of information, and higher fidelity in those sources, can improve people’s decisions, but each increase in information reduces privacy. In this thesis, we look at whether the type of relationship between the observer and the person being observed can be used to manage this trade-off. We conducted a survey that asked people what amount of information from different sources that they would disclose to seven different relationship types. We found that in more than half of the cases, people would give different amounts of information to different relationships. We then constructed a prototype system and conducted a Wizard of Oz experiment where we took the system into the real world and observed individuals using it. Our results suggest that awareness servers can be improved by allowing finer-grained control than what is currently available.