Over-exposed?

Abstract

As sharing personal media online becomes easier and widely spread, new privacy concerns emerge - especially when the persistent nature of the media and associated context reveals details about the physical and social context in which the media items were created. In a first-of-its-kind study, we use context-aware camerephone devices to examine privacy decisions in mobile and online photo sharing. Through data analysis on a corpus of privacy decisions and associated context data from a real-world system, we identify relationships between location of photo capture and photo privacy settings. Our data analysis leads to further questions which we investigate through a set of interviews with 15 users. The interviews reveal common themes in privacy considerations: security, social disclosure, identity and convenience. Finally, we highlight several implications and opportunities for design of media sharing applications, including using past privacy patterns to prevent oversights and errors.