Privacy in Video Media Spaces

Video Media Spaces are fully interconnected multi-person audio / video networks that are usually on most of the time. They benefit distributed teamwork by providing rich informal awareness and casual interactions to distance-separated colleagues. The problem is that media spaces are invasive to privacy. Deliberate abuses are possible, inadvertent violations are routine, and user and non-user apprehension runs high.
These issues arise out of subtle interactions between the technical factors of media space design / implementation and the human and social factors of privacy. Accordingly, in this talk I will approach this problem from two perspectives.
First, I take a bottom-up approach that focuses on technology for privacy preserving video media spaces. I give demos of the Collabrary toolkit for rapidly implementing working system media space prototypes, and discuss the results of evaluations of the blur and pixelise video distortion filters for balancing awareness and privacy in home and office environments.
Second, I pursue a top-down approach that draws from social science theory of privacy. I present a comprehensive vocabulary that embodies this theory and a method, called “privacy inventories”, for systematically describing and analysing the privacy-design link. This theoretical approach disambiguates the many subtle interrelated facets of privacy and reveals hidden assumptions and omissions in a system’s support for it.
This talk will be of interest to anyone seeking a structured way for thinking about privacy and computer system design / use, and will be accessible to both computer scientists and social scientists.