Observers' Privacy Concerns about Wearable Cameras
Open Access
- Author:
- Ge, Jun
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 31, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Mary Beth Rosson, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- privacy
wearable technology
recording technology
scenario-based design
survey
user experience - Abstract:
- Recently, wearable cameras and glass-style augmented reality devices such as Narrative Clip and Google Glass have entered the market and attracted much attention from both industry and academia. These devices are designed to be extremely portable and convenient for the user to capture a log of his or her daily life; they also have significant computing functionality and can be connected to the Internet at any time. However, because of the portability and invisibility characteristics of wearable cameras, not only the end-users but also the observers, become important stakeholders whose feelings of privacy may also be affected by the use of these devices. Therefore, questions are increasingly asked about potential privacy threats and ethical issues of these devices including what content will be captured, who will use this information, and how this information will be used in future. In this study, we address the observers’ privacy concerns about wearable cameras as they might be used and experienced in different scenarios by combining qualitative and quantitative research. We first conducted four focus group interviews to explore the observers’ general perceptions and concerns. Drawing from the feedback received in these sessions, we developed and fielded an online survey (N=400) to investigate observers’ attitude, reaction, dimensions of privacy concern and concern about diverse type of information in nine different scenarios. We found that these concerns and reactions varied across scenarios, because of differences in the activity locations, actions, purposes and degree of observer control. We also found that some observer characteristics were related to their reported privacy concerns, including gender, age group, technology use history and media exposure to privacy invasion news. We hope this study can expand the research area, and provide insights for both companies who wish to develop commercialized wearable devices and for researchers who seek to contribute future design and research studies.