Over-exposed?

In a first-of-its-kind study, context-aware camerephone devices are used to examine privacy decisions in mobile and online photo sharing and identify relationships between location of photo capture and photo privacy settings.

Abstract

As sharing personal media online becomes easier and widely spread, new privacy concerns emerge - especially when the persistent nature of the media and associated context reveals details about the physical and social context in which the media items were created. In a first-of-its-kind study, we use context-aware camerephone devices to examine privacy decisions in mobile and online photo sharing. Through data analysis on a corpus of privacy decisions and associated context data from a real-world system, we identify relationships between location of photo capture and photo privacy settings. Our data analysis leads to further questions which we investigate through a set of interviews with 15 users. The interviews reveal common themes in privacy considerations: security, social disclosure, identity and convenience. Finally, we highlight several implications and opportunities for design of media sharing applications, including using past privacy patterns to prevent oversights and errors.