Personal privacy through understanding and action: five pitfalls for designers

To participate in meaningful privacy practice in the context of technical systems, people require opportunities to understand the extent of the systems alignment with relevant practice and to conduct discernible social action through intuitive or sensible engagement with the system. It is a significant challenge to design for such understanding and action through the feedback and control mechanisms of todays devices. To help designers meet this challenge, we describe five pitfalls to beware when designing interactive systems—on or off the desktop—with personal privacy implications. These pitfalls are: (1) obscuring potential information flow, (2) obscuring actual information flow, (3) emphasizing configuration over action, (4) lacking coarse-grained control, and (5) inhibiting existing practice. They are based on a review of the literature, on analyses of existing privacy-affecting systems, and on our own experiences in designing a prototypical user interface for managing privacy in ubiquitous computing. We illustrate how some existing research and commercial systems—our prototype included—fall into these pitfalls and how some avoid them. We suggest that privacy-affecting systems that heed these pitfalls can help users appropriate and engage them in alignment with relevant privacy practice.

Hardiness and optimism as expressed in coping patterns.

These studies focused on the differences between hardiness (HAR) and optimism in their relationship to transformational coping ([TC]; e.g., problem solving, planning) and regressive coping (e.g., disengagement, stoicism). Specifically, it was hypothesized that the pattern of involvement in TC and avoidance coping is clearer in HAR than in optimism. In the first study, participants reported their usual coping efforts when confronted with stressful circumstances. The second study required participants to identify a significant current stressor and report on their ongoing efforts to cope with it. In both studies, HAR related to more coping efforts than did optimism. Furthermore, although both HAR and optimism related positively to signs of TC, only HAR related negatively to signs of regressive coping. The third study involved participants confronted with life-threatening stressor. Here, optimism increased to the level of HAR in the number of coping efforts used. But the pattern for optimism combined transformational coping with stoicism (regressive coping), whereas the pattern for HAR was the same as in the two previous. studies. Results of the three studies suggest that the hypothesis is accurate and that HAR involves less complacency than does optimism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Smooth Gaze: a framework for recovering tasks across devices using eye tracking

A user task is often distributed across devices, e.g., a student listening to a lecture in a classroom while watching slides on a projected screen and making notes on her laptop, and sometimes checking Twitter for comments on her smartphone. In scenarios like this, users move between heterogeneous devices and have to deal with task resumption overhead from both physical and mental perspectives. To address this problem, we created Smooth Gaze, a framework for recording the user’s work state and resuming it seamlessly across devices by leveraging implicit gaze input. In particular, we propose two novel and intuitive techniques, smart watching and smart posting, for detecting which display and target region the user is looking at, and transferring and integrating content across devices respectively. In addition, we designed and implemented a cross-device reading system SmoothReading that captures content from secondary devices and generates annotations based on eye tracking, to be displayed on the primary device. We conducted a study that showed that the system supported information seeking and task resumption, and improved users’ overall reading experience.