Toward Understanding Preferences for Sharing and Privacy

MSR-TR-2004-138 |

E-commerce has spawned a growing concern and
discussion about privacy. Similar concerns about privacy
are emerging with ubiquitous computing applications that
sense and report one’s location and activity. But sharing is
as important as privacy; work and social interaction are
more efficient when people share some information with
some recipients. Unfortunately, commonly available tools
for specifying who can see what have been too complex
and tedious for most computer users. We report on studies
of preferences about privacy and sharing aimed at
identifying fundamental concerns with privacy and at
understanding how people might abstract the details of
sharing into higher-level classes of recipients and
information that people tend to treat in a similar manner.
To characterize such classes, we collected information
about sharing preferences, recruiting 30 people to specify
what information they are willing to share with whom.
Although people vary in their overall level of comfort in
sharing, we discovered key classes of recipients and
information. Such abstractions highlight the promise of
developing simpler, more expressive controls for sharing
and privacy.