Privacy and social network applications

Privacy technological threatens are no limited to data protection. Social Network Applications (SNA) and ubiquitous computing or Ambient Intelligence face other privacy risks. The business model of SNA and the improvement of data mining allow social computation. SNA regulation should favor privacy-by-design and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET). Default friendly-privacy policies should also be adopted. The data portability of the applications shifts SNA into a new field of ubiquitous computing. Therefore, the solutions of the Ambient Intelligence shoud be also analysed in the context of SNA

A design space for social object labels in museums

Taking a problematic user experience with ubiquitous annotation as its point of departure, this thesis defines and explores the design space for Social Object Labels (SOLs), small interactive displays aiming to support users' in-situ engagement with digital annotations of physical objects and places by providing up-to-date information before, during and after interaction. While the concept of ubiquitous annotation has potential applications in a wide range of domains, the research focuses in particular on SOLs in a museum context, where they can support the institution's educational goals by engaging visitors in the interpretation of exhibits and providing a platform for public discourse to complement official interpretations provided on traditional object labels. The thesis defines and structures the design space for SOLs, investigates how they can support social interpretation in museums and develops empirically validated design recommendations. Reflecting the developmental character of the research, it employs Design Research as a methodological framework, which involves the iterative development and evaluation of design artefacts together with users and other stakeholders. The research identifies the particular characteristics of SOLs and structures their design space into ten high-level aspects, synthesised from taxonomies and heuristics for similar display concepts and complemented with aspects emerging from the iterative design and evaluation of prototypes. It presents findings from a survey exploring visitors' mental models, preferences and expectations of commenting in museums and translates them into requirements for SOLs. It reports on scenario-based design activities, expert interviews with museum professionals, formative user studies and co-design sessions, and two empirical evaluations of SOL prototypes in a gallery environment. Pulling together findings from these research activities it then formulates design recommendations for SOLs and supports them with related evidence and implementation examples. The main contributions are (i) to delineate and structure the design space for SOLs, which helps to ground SOLs in the literature and understand them as a distinct display concept with its own characteristics; (ii) to explore, for the first time, a visitor perspective on commenting in museums, which can inform research, development and policies on user-generated content in museums and the wider cultural heritage sector; (iii) to develop empirically validated design recommendations, which can inform future research and development into SOLs and related display concept. The thesis concludes by summarising findings in relation to its stated research questions, restating its contributions from ubiquitous computing, domain and methodology perspectives, and discussing open issues and future work

DroPicks – A Tool for Collaborative Content Sharing Exploiting Everyday Artefacts

ABSTRACT. Emergence of social web services like YouTube[1], Flickr[2] etc. is constantly transforming the way we share our lifestyles with family, friends and colleagues. The significance of specific contents can be enhanced if shared with the right person, at right location and time. This paper explores this contextual social content sharing mechanism and presents DroPicks that utilizes augmented everyday artefacts as containers for digital information. Many everyday artefacts are immobile, which implicitly restricts contents stored to a location. Such indirect, contextual sharing has advantages over direct communication mechanisms (E-mail, SMS, IM...) as it provides the content in correct context, seeking minimal attention. Considering the lightness of social contents, we argue that our approach is appropriate, as it does not seek immediate attention, but rather offers the content in the background.