Improving availability awareness with relationship filtering
Date
2005-09-16
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Degree Level
Masters
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.
Description
Keywords
privacy, Availability awareness, awareness servers., instant messaging
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Computer Science
Program
Computer Science