Abstract
This paper addresses the need of interpersonal privacy coordination mechanisms in the context of mediated communication, emphasizing the dialectic and dynamic nature of privacy. We contribute the Privacy Grounding Model—built upon the Common Ground theory—that describes how connected individuals create and adapt privacy borders dynamically and in a collaborative process. We present the theoretical foundations of the model. We also show the applicability of the model, where we give evidence from a field study that illustrates how it can describe privacy coordination mechanisms amongst users of an instant messaging application and a desktop awareness system. The model describes efficient and effective factors that communicators consider in their decisions to use mechanisms for coordination. The Privacy Grounding Model aims to help designers reflect on how their system supports, or fails to support, people’s need for lightweight and distinctive privacy coordination mechanisms, and in particular how communicators within the system create and use privacy border representations for grounding their needs to interact with each other.
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Notes
We recognize that this separation may be somewhat artificial. The pilot study showed that participants signaled coordination contributions (track-II) using content channels (e.g., a text message ‘I’m back’), most likely to overcome the lack of appropriate track-II channels for coordination purposes.
Diary entries were not considered as interaction signals for the coding analysis, therefore they are not present in Table 1. The response rate of the prompts was 15 %, with a highest number of entries in the first week: 29.3 average per day.
The extracts presented here were adapted to improve the legibility: a header row was added, participants’ name were encrypted as ‘P X’ were X was a number from 1 to 15 to identify each participant, which sometimes was followed by an ‘@’ and a text to indicate the location of the telecommuters, and a black bar on the video snapshots was added to protect the participants’ identity when necessary (note that a blurred image was an effect intended by the participants, not a manipulation of the experimenter). For later analysis the coding results of the signaling characterizations are represented in the last four columns: “Br”, “Ba”, “Si”, and “Di” correspond to brevity, peripheralness (background), simultaneity and distinctiveness respectively, using the codes ‘+’ to indicate that the characterization was present and ‘−’ to indicate the contrary.
The distance to the community was defined considering their work/social and physical distance from the core group. A person could be physically further away but socially close.
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Acknowledgment
We thank our experimental participants for their participation in our studies.
Background
The reported research is based on Romero’s doctoral thesis done at TU Eindhoven.
Support
The GroupLab research group (Computer Science Department, University of Calgary) and the User Centered Design research group (Industrial Design Department, Eindhoven University of Technology) for providing all the facilities needed to conduct this research
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Romero, N.A., Markopoulos, P. & Greenberg, S. Grounding Privacy in Mediated Communication. Comput Supported Coop Work 22, 1–32 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9177-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9177-z