Based on the initial idea of Ubiquitous Computing (Weiser, 1991), the concept of ‘Smart Environments’ envisions a future, where a multitude of computers are seamlessly embedded into everyday objects of the physical world. In this sense, Cook and Das (2004) define a smart environment as “a small world, where all kinds of smart devices are continuously working to make inhabitants’ lives more comfortable”.
Published in Chapter:
Information Security at Large Public Displays
Carsten Röcker (University of California, San Diego, USA), Carsten Magerkurth (SAP Research, CEC St. Gallen, Switzerland), and Steve Hinske (Institute for Pervasive Computing, ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-132-2.ch028
Abstract
In this chapter we present a novel concept for personalized privacy support on large public displays. In the first step, two formative evaluations are conducted in order to analyze the requirements of potential users regarding the protection of private information on large public displays. The insights gained in these evaluations are used to design a system that automatically adapts the information visible on public displays according to the current social situation and the individual privacy preferences of the user working on the display. In a third evaluation, the developed system is evaluated regarding its appropriateness for daily usage and its usefulness to protect privacy. The results of the evaluation show that users are in general willing to trust system-based protection mechanisms, provided that they are well implemented. In this context, the proposed combination of pre-defined privacy profiles and context-adapted information visualization proved to be a good trade-off between usability and adequate privacy protection.