Using Technology Enabled Qualitative Research to Develop Products for the Social Good, An Overview

This paper discusses the potential benefits of the convergence of three recent trends for the design of socially beneficial products and services: the increasing application of qualitative research techniques in a wide range of disciplines, the rapid mainstreaming of social media and mobile technologies, and the emergence of software as a service. Presented is a scenario facilitating the complex data collection, analysis, storage, and reporting required for the qualitative research recommended for the task of designing relevant solutions to address needs of the underserved. A pilot study is used as a basis for describing the infrastructure and services required to realize this scenario. Implications for innovation of enhanced forms of qualitative research are presented

Implementation of Privacy Policy Specification System for User Uploaded Images over Popular Content Sharing Sites

The regular use of social networking websites and application encompasses the collection and retention of personal and very often sensitive information about users. This information needs to remain private and each social network owns a privacy policy that describes in-depth how user’s information is managed and published. As there is increasing use of images for sharing through social sites, maintaining privacy has become a major problem. In light of these incidents, the need of tools to aid users control access to their shared content is necessary. This problem can be proposed by using an Privacy Policy Specification system to help users compose privacy settings for their shared images. Toward addressing this need, we propose Privacy Policy Specification system to help users to specify privacy settings for their images. Privacy Policy Specification System configure a policy for a group and apply appropriate policies (comment, share, expiry, download) on image for sharing in the group

Spartan Daily November 30, 2011

Volume 137, Issue 48https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1102/thumbnail.jp

Google Street View: Walking the Line of Privacy-Intrusion upon Seclusion and Publicity Given to Private Facts in the Digital Age

On a snowy evening, a man hears of a new restaurant opening in a distant suburb of his metropolis and looks for driving directions to take his significant other out for a romantic evening. He opens Google and conducts a driving direction search. As they have never been to the location, and as the weather is not optimal, they check the layout of the roads in order to alleviate safety concerns through Google's Street View Program. They click on the images next\ud to the proposed turns and see a picture of a man walking with a woman at the intersection. Later it is disclosed in the news that this individual is a high-ranking government official and the woman is not his wife, but his mistress. In another image, a smoker is lounging in the background, hiding his addiction from his family and friends. With another click of the mouse he sees sunbathers sitting on top of the roof of a building, enjoying the warm summer day as well as the seeming privacy and anonymity of their rooftop abode

Capturing personality from Facebook photos and photo-related activities: How much exposure do you need?

Photo-related activities are noticeably prevalent among social media users. On Facebook, users predominantly communicate visually and manage their self-presentation. Such online behaviours tend to mimic what would be expected of individuals’ offline personalities. This study sought to address the link between Facebook users’ photo-related activities and the Big Five personality traits by encoding basic Facebook visual features. Content analysis on the actual profiles (n = 115) and multiple regression analyses revealed many associations as a manifestation of users’ characteristics. For instance, Neuroticism and Extraversion predicted more photo uploads. Conscientiousness was predictive of more self-generated albums and video uploads and Agreeableness predicted the average number of received ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ on profile pictures. Additionally, the Facebook experience in interaction with the personality factors was found to be influential on the type of photo-related activity and the level of photo participation of users. The findings provide evidence that Facebook users with various personality traits set up albums and upload photos differently. Given the uses and gratification model, users adapt the construction of their profiles and manage their interactions to gratify their psychological needs on Facebook

Why Johnny Fails to Protect his Privacy

Albeit people worldwide cry out for the protection of their privacy, they often fail to successfully protect their private data. Possible reasons for this failure that have been identified in previous research include a lack of knowledge about possible privacy consequences, the negative outcome of a rational cost-benefit analysis, and insufficient ability for protection on the users’ side. However, these findings mainly base on theoretical considerations or results from quantitative studies, and no comprehensive explanation for users’ privacy behavior has been found so far. We thus conducted an interview study with 24 participants to qualitatively investigate what are (1) users’ mental models of privacy consequences, (2) obstacles for privacy protection, and (3) strategies for privacy protection. Our results provide evidence for all possible explanations: We find that most of our participants are indeed unaware of most consequences that could result from not protecting their privacy besides personalized advertisement and financial loss. We also identify several obstacles for privacy protection, such as protection being too much effort, too complicated, users lacking knowledge, or social aspects. Protection strategies mostly base on reducing the amount of data disclosed and most users refrain from using advanced PETs. We further identified additional factors which influence whether people adopt measures to protect their privacy and propose a model which subsumes all factors that are relevant for people’s decision to apply protection measures