BALANCING PRIVACY AND AWARENESS FOR TELECOMMUTERS USING BLUR FILTRATION
Date
2003-02-14
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Abstract
Always-on video provides rich awareness for co-workers separated by
distance, yet it has the potential to threaten privacy as sensitive details
may be broadcast to others. This threat increases for telecommuters who work
at home and connect to office-based colleagues using video. One technique
for balancing privacy and awareness is blur filtration, which blurs video to
hide sensitive details while still giving the viewer a sense of what is
going on. While other researchers found that blur filtration mitigates
privacy concerns in low-risk office settings, we do not know if it works for
riskier situations that can occur in telecommuting settings. Using a
controlled experiment, we evaluated blur filtration for its effectiveness in
balancing privacy with awareness for typical home situations faced by
telecommuters. Participants viewed five video scenes containing a
telecommuter at ten levels of blur, where scenes ranged from little to
extreme privacy risk. They then answered awareness and privacy questions
about these scenes. Our results show that blur filtration is only able to
balance privacy with awareness for mundane home scenes. The implication is
that blur filtration by itself does not suffice for privacy protection in
video-based telecommuting situations; other privacy-protecting strategies
are required.
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Computer Science