Using relationship to control disclosure in Awareness servers

Abstract

Awareness servers provide information about a person to help observers determine whether they are available for contact. A tradeoff exists in these systems: more sources of information, and higher fidelity in those sources, can improve people’s decisions, but each increase in information reduces privacy. In this paper, we look at whether the type of relationship between the observer and the person being observed can be used to manage this tradeoff. We conducted a survey that asked people what amount of information from different sources that they would disclose to seven different relationship types. We found that in more than half of the cases, people would give different amounts of information to different relationships. We also found that the only relationship to consistently receive less information was the acquaintance – essentially the person without a strong relationship at all. Our results suggest that awareness servers can be improved by allowing finergrained control than what is currently available.