Wearables for physical privacy

Physical or bodily privacy is an innate need that drives a variety of human behaviours. However, in a highly dynamic, crowded and context dependent world with rapidly changing technology, other humans or technological devices can pose threats to the physical privacy of an individual in many ways. This short paper explores the use of wearable devices to tackle this multi-faceted problem

Privacy itch and scratch: on body privacy warnings and controls

In the age of ubiquitous computing increasing amounts of personal data are being logged and shared, making privacy management a challenging task that must be integrated into our daily lives. In this paper, we explore the metaphors of ‘privacy itch’ for warnings and ‘privacy scratch’ for control of privacy preferences through real time, on-body, haptic interaction technologies. To assess the utility of these concepts, we implemented a forearm wearable prototype: the Privacy Band, and conducted a small lab-based user study

Privacy care: a tangible interaction framework for privacy management

The emergence of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) environments has increased the risk of undesired access to individuals’ physical space or their information, anytime and anywhere, raising potentially serious privacy concerns. Individuals lack awareness and control of the vulnerabilitiesin everyday contexts, and need support and care in regulating disclosures to their physical and digital selves. Existing GUI-based solutions, however, often feel physically interruptive, socially disruptive, time consuming and cumbersome. To address such challenges, we investigate the user interaction experience and discuss the need for more tangible and embodied interactions for effective and seamless natural privacy management in everyday UbiComp settings. We propose the Privacy Care interaction framework that is rooted in the literature of privacy management and tangible computing. Keeping users at the centre, Awareness and Control are established as the core parts of our framework. This is supported with three interrelated interaction tenets: Direct, Ready-to-Hand and Contextual. Direct refers to intuitiveness through metaphor usage. Ready-to-Hand supports granularity, non intrusiveness and ad-hoc management, through periphery-to-centre style attention transitions. Contextual supports customisation through modularity and configurability. Together, they aim to provide experience of an embodied privacy care with varied interactions that are calming and yet actively empowering. The framework provides designers of such care with a basis to refer to, to generate effective tangible tools for privacy management in everyday settings. Through five semi-structured focus groups, we explore the privacy challenges faced by a sample set of 15 older adults (aged 60+) across their cyber-physical-social spaces. The results show conformity to our framework, demonstrating the relevance of the facets of the framework to the design of privacy management tools in everyday UbiComp contexts

Up close & personal: exploring user-preferred image schemas for intuitive privacy awareness and control

Effective end-user privacy management in everyday ubiquitous computing environments requires giving users complex, contextual information about potential privacy breaches and enabling management of these breaches in a timely, engaging and intuitive manner. In this paper, we propose using empirically grounded image schema-based metaphors to help design these interactions. Results from our exploratory user study (N=22) demonstrate end users’ preferences for changes in physical attributes and spatial properties of objects for privacy awareness. For privacy control, end users prefer to exert force and create spatial movement. The study also explores user preferences for wearable vs. ambient form-factors for managing privacy and concludes that a hybrid solution would work for more users across more contexts. We thus provide a combination of form factor preferences, and a focused set of image schemas for designers to use when designing metaphor-based tangible privacy management tools.</p

A card-based ideation toolkit to generate designs for tangible privacy management tools

Effective privacy protection in dynamic UbiComp environments requires users to be able to manage their privacy seamlessly across diverse contexts. To support this, designers need to go beyond GUI-based interactions and utilise tangible and embodied interactions. To help designers in such endeavours, we present the TTP toolkit: a card-based ideation kit to generate designs for tangible privacy management tools. The toolkit translates the Privacy Care framework for tangible-supported privacy management into a game intended to support designers in developing TUI privacy management tools. We demonstrate use of our toolkit through 10 online participatory workshops with 22 interaction designers. Our results demonstrate that the toolkit was effective in supporting the participants to creatively and collaboratively generate meaningful conceptual designs of tangible tools for privacy management.</p

Logging you, logging me: a replicable study of privacy and sharing behaviour in groups of visual lifeloggers

Low cost digital cameras in smartphones and wearable devices make it easy for people to automatically capture and share images as a visual lifelog. Having been inspired by a US campus based study that explored individual privacy behaviours of visual lifeloggers, we conducted a similar study on a UK campus, however we also focussed on the privacy behaviours of groups of lifeloggers. We argue for the importance of replicability and therefore we built a publicly available toolkit, which includes camera design, study guidelines and source code. Our results show some similar sharing behaviour to the US based study: people tried to preserve the privacy of strangers, but we found fewer bystander reactions despite using a more obvious camera. In contrast, we did not nd a reluctance to share images of screens but we did nd that images of vices were shared less. Regarding privacy behaviours in groups of lifeloggers, we found that people were more willing to share images of people they were interacting with than of strangers, that lifelogging in groups could change what de nes a private space, and that lifelogging groups establish di erent rules to manage privacy for those inside and outside the group

Socio-technical resilience for community healthcare

Older adults at home frequently rely on ‘circles of support’ which range from relatives and neighbours, to the voluntary sector, social workers, paid carers, and medical professionals. Creating, maintaining, and coordinating these circles of support has often been done manually and in an ad hoc manner. We argue that a socio-technical system that assists in creating, maintaining, and coordinating circles of support is a key enabler of community healthcare for older adults.In this paper we propose a framework called SERVICE (Socio-Technical Resilience for the Vulnerable) to help represent, reason about, and coordinate these circles of support and strengthen their capacity to deal with variations in care needs and environment. The objective is to make these circles resilient to changes in the needs and circumstances of older adults. Early results show that older adults appreciate the ability to represent and reflect on their circle of support.</p

Loneliness in older people and COVID-19: Applying the social identity approach to digital intervention design

The COVID-19 pandemic is worsening loneliness for many older people through the challenges it poses in engaging with their social worlds. Digital technology has been offered as a potential aid, however, many popular digital tools have not been designed to address the needs of older adults during times of limited contact. We propose that the Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC) could be a foundation for digital loneliness interventions. While SIMIC is a well-established approach for maintaining wellbeing during life transitions, it has not been rigorously applied to digital interventions. There are known challenges to integrating psychological theory in the design of digital technology to enable efficacy, technology acceptance, and continued use. The interdisciplinary field of Human Computer Interaction has a history of drawing on models originating from psychology to improve the design of digital technology and to design technologies in an appropriate manner. Drawing on key lessons from this literature, we consolidate research and design guidelines for multidisciplinary research applying psychological theory such as SIMIC to digital social interventions for loneliness