Is Anyone Looking? Mitigating Shoulder Surfing on Public Displays through Awareness and Protection
Date
2014-03-12
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Abstract
Displays are growing in size, and are increasingly deployed in
semi-public and public areas. When people use these public
displays to pursue personal work, they expose their activities and
sensitive data to passers-by. In most cases, such shoulder-surfing
by others is likely voyeuristic vs. a deliberate attempt to steal
information. Even so, safeguards are needed. Our goal is to mitigate
shoulder-surfing problems in such settings. Our method leverages
notions of territoriality and proxemics, where we sense and take
action based on the spatial relationships between the passerby, the
user of the display, and the display itself. First, we provide
participants with awareness of shoulder-surfing moments, which in
turn helps both parties regulate their behaviours and mediate further
social interactions. Second, we provide methods that protect
information when shoulder-surfing is detected. Here, users can
move or hide information through easy to perform explicit actions.
Alternately, the system itself can mask information from the
passerby’s view when it detects shoulder-surfing moments.
Description
Keywords
Design, Human Factors