Michael Boyle
Saul Greenberg
ABSTRACT
Video-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be filtered to mask out potentially sensitive information. While a variety of filtering techniques exist, they have not been evaluated for how well they safeguard privacy.
In this paper, we analyze how a blur and a pixelize video filter might impact both awareness and privacy in a media space. Each filter is considered at nine different levels of fidelity, ranging from heavily applied filter levels that mask almost all information, to lightly applied filters that reveal almost everything. We examined how well observers of several filtered video scenes extract particular awareness cues: the number of actors; their posture (moving, standing, seated); their gender; the visible objects (basic to detailed); and how available people look (their busyness, seriousness and approachability). We also examined the privacy-preserving potential of each filter level in the context of common workplace activities. Our results suggest that the blur filter, and to a lesser extent the pixelize filter, have a level suitable for providing awareness information while safeguarding privacy.
- 1.Bellotti, V. (1996) What you don't know can hurt you: Privacy in collaborative computing. Proc HCI'96 Conference on People and Computers XI, 241-261, Springer. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 2.Buxton, W. (1997) Living in augmented reality: Ubiquitous media and reactive environments. In K. Finn, A. Sellen and S. Wilbur (eds) Video Mediated Communication, Hillsdale, NJ.Google Scholar
- 3.Cockburn, A. and Greenberg, S. (1993) Making contact: Getting the group communicating with groupware. In Proc ACM COOCS'93, 31-41. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 4.Crowley, J. Coutaz, J., and Berard, F. (2000) Things that see. Commun. ACM, 43(3), 54-64. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 5.Deriche, R. (1990) Fast algorithms for low-level vision. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 12(1), 78-87, January. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 6.Dourish, P. and Bly, S. (1992) Portholes: Supporting awareness in a distributed work group. Proc ACM CHI'92, 541-547. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 7.Gaver, W., Moran, T., MacLean, A., L~vstrand, L., Dourish, P., Carter, K and Buxton, W. (1992). Realizing a video environment: EuroPARC's RAVE system. Proc ACM CHI'92, 27-34. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 8.Greenberg, S. and Kuzuoka, H. (2000). Using digital but physical surrogates to mediate awareness, communication and privacy in media spaces. Personal Technologies, 4(1), January, Elsevier.Google Scholar
- 9.Harper, R. (1995) Why people do and don't wear active badges. CSCW Journal, 4(4), p297-318 Google ScholarDigital Library
- 10.Hudson, S. and Smith, I. (1996) Techniques for addressing fundamental privacy and disruption tradeoffs in awareness support systems. Proc ACM CSCW'96, 248-257. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 11.Kraut, R., Egido, C. and Galegher, J. (1988) Patterns of contact and communication in scientific collaboration. Proc ACM CSCW'88, 1-12. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 12.Kuzuoka, H. and Greenberg, S. (1999) Mediating awareness and communication through digital but physical surrogates. ACM CHI'99 Video Proceedings and Conference Extended Abstracts. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 13.Lee, A., Girgensohn, A. and Schlueter, K. (1997) NYNEX Portholes: Initial user reactions and redesign implications issues in technology supporting learning. Proc ACM GROUP'97, 385-394 Google ScholarDigital Library
- 14.Tang, J., Isaacs, E. and Rua, M. (1994) Supporting distributed groups with a Montage of lightweight interactions. Proc ACM CSCW'94, 23-34. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 15.Zhao, Q. and Stasko, J. (1998) Evaluating image filtering based techniques in media space applications. Proc ACM CSCW'98,11-18. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- The effects of filtered video on awareness and privacy
Recommendations
Blur filtration fails to preserve privacy for home-based video conferencing
Always-on video provides rich awareness for distance-separated coworkers. Yet video can threaten privacy, especially when it captures telecommuters working at home. We evaluated video blurring, an image masking method long touted to balance privacy and ...
Artifact awareness through screen sharing for distributed groups
Co-located collaborators can see the artifacts that others are working on, which in turn enables casual interactions. To help distributed collaborators maintain mutual awareness of people's electronic work artifacts, we designed and implemented an ...
Social awareness: the power of digital elements in collaborative environment
Awareness is the sense of what is happening, who is around, what they are doing, what their states of emotion and whether or not they notice you. Social awareness and how they are promoted by digital elements in networked collaborative virtual ...
Comments