Design for privacy in ubiquitous computing environments

Bellotti and Bly discuss various ways technology breaks down social communication conventions and mechanism that are taken for granted in everyday world, and suggests that technologies result in disembodiment of context from and into which one projects his information and and disassociation of one's actions. For example, when computer mediated, a lot of social cues are attenuated or we might not realize that our information is visible to others. For disassociation, it might be that, for a shared workspace, only the results of our actions are shared, not our the process of actions itself. Considering these issues, they propose a framework for designing and evaluating privacy issues in ubiquitous computing systems.

It seems while RAVE system is well accepted in this specific culture, it was highly suspected it might very likely be subject to sinister use in other cultures.

It is interesting that they discuss the privacy mechanism itself might introduce new privacy issues. for example, in order to inform the visitors in the commons area with cameras installed who are connected and are able to see them, one solution is to project images of those who are connected, which then makes individuals who connects to the common area feels intrusive. it is an interesting dilemma, when you introduce new solutions to other problems, these solutions introduce new problems to solve.

They mentioned issues of awareness and privacy: while providing too much awareness information of others people's activities and availabilities might seem to be intrusive, so is too little awareness information - it can cause intrusion too when one can not tell easily the availability of others.