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Computer Privacy

In: Computers and Technology

Submitted By CindyLou
Words 799
Pages 4
| Computer Privacy | For Managing Information Systems |

C Potts10-26-2015 |

COMPUTER PRIVACY
Privacy can be a key aspect of the user experience with computers, online systems, and new technologies. Knowing what to consider about users and their views of computer systems can only improve privacy mechanisms.
Privacy is emerging as a critical design element for interactive systems in areas as diverse as e-commerce, health care, office work, and personal communications. These systems face the same fundamental tension. On the one hand, personal information can be used to streamline interactions, facilitate communication, and improve services. On the other hand, this same information introduces risks, ranging from mere distractions to extreme threats. Government reports, essays, books, and media coverage testify on peoples’ concerns regarding the potential for abuse and general unease over the lack of control over a variety of computer systems. Similarly, application developers worry that privacy concerns can impair the acceptance and adoption of their systems. No end-to-end solutions exist to design privacy-respecting systems that cater to user concerns. This paper will show that researchers in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) can greatly improve the protection of individual’s personal information, because many of the threats and vulnerabilities associated with privacy originate from the interactions between the people using information systems, rather than the actual systems themselves. Approaching the topic of privacy can be daunting for the HCI practitioner, because the research literature on privacy is dispersed across multiple communities, including computer networking, systems, HCI, requirements engineering, management information systems (MIS), marketing, jurisprudence, and the social sciences. Even within HCI, the privacy literature is fairly spread out. Furthermore, many IT professionals have common-sense notions about privacy that can turn out to be inaccurate. Hence, the goal of this article is to provide a unified overview of privacy research in HCI, focusing specifically on issues related to the evaluation of end-user systems that have privacy implications.
Now to present two philosophical outlooks on privacy that will help the practitioner frame research questions and design issues. Human–computer interaction is uniquely suited to help design teams manage the challenges brought by the need of protecting privacy and personal information. First, HCI can help understand the many notions of privacy that people have. For example, there are four states of privacy: solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve. These perspectives represent different and sometimes conflicting worldviews on privacy. Second, a concept of tradeoff is implicit in most discussions about privacy. Tradeoffs must also be made between competing interests in system design. Because HCI practitioners possess a holistic view of the interaction of the user with the technology, they are ideally positioned to optimally work through and solve these tradeoffs. Third, privacy interacts with other social concerns, such as control, authority, appropriateness, and appearance. Here, the discriminating application of HCI tools can vastly improve the accuracy and quality of the assumptions and requirements feeding into system design. Fourth, privacy can be hard to rationalize. Multiple studies have demonstrated that there is a difference between privacy preferences and actual behavior. Many people are also unable to accurately evaluate low probability but high impact risks, especially related to events that may be far removed from the time and place of the initial cause. Furthermore, privacy is fraught with exceptions, due to contingent situations and historical context. The need for flexibility in these constructs is reflected by all the exceptions present in data protection legislation and by social science literature that describes privacy as a continuous interpersonal “boundary-definition process” rather than a static condition. The use of modern “behavioral” inquiry techniques in HCI can help explicate these behaviors and exceptions. Finally, it is often difficult to evaluate the effects of technology on privacy. There are few well-defined methods for anticipating what privacy features are necessary for a system to gain wide-scale adoption by consumers. Similarly, there is little guidance for measuring what level of privacy a system effectively offers or what its overall return on investment is. Like “usability” and “security,” privacy is a holistic property of interactive systems, which include the people using them. An entire system may be ruined by a single poorly implemented component that leaks personal information, or a poor interface that users cannot understand. HCI provides a rich set of tools that can be used to probe how people perceive privacy threats, understand how people share personal information with others, and evaluate how well a given system facilitates (or inhibits) desired privacy practices. As much as we have progressed our understanding of privacy within HCI in the last 30 years, we should also recognize that there are major research challenges remaining.
The purpose of this article is to point out areas of research that are timely but lagging.

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