Current Researchers: David Nguyen, Alex Bretana, and Gillian Hayes

Past Collaborators: Gabriela Marcu, Brian Sone, Aurora Bedford, Gillian Hayes, Khai Truong (University of Toronto), James Scott (Microsoft Research), and Marc Langheinrich (ETH Zurich)

Project: Tools for electronic recording have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. As a result, just when people think they understand a technology enough to react to it – avoiding or embracing it – new technologies are invented and deployed, making it nearly impossible for even the most technologically savvy to keep up.

During design and initial product introduction, many different stakeholders make important choices that affect the ways in which these technologies might be perceived, used, and sometimes rejected. However, no matter what choices these stakeholders make, those people destined to encounter these technologies still choose to reject, live with, or appropriate these technologies based on their own understanding of them. Knowledge of how people make decisions about recording technologies based in both technical and social influences is critically missing today. This project contributes to ongoing research in privacy and security, ubiquitous computing, and technology and policy studies.

This work is supported in part by the collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge.

A recent paper from this work will be presented at Ubicomp 2008:
An Empirical Investigation of Concerns of Everyday Tracking and Recording Technologies
David H. Nguyen
Alfred Kobsa
Gillian R. Hayes

Gillian had the privilege of joining Gary McGraw, Kim DeVries, Jim Routh, and Avi Ruben in a great panel at RSA.  The panel was largely about how to negotiate Acceptable Use Policies and technical infrastructure for security given the mounting pressure for people in the workplace–especially those who are on the younger side of things–to make use of these tools, as part of their work and as part of multi-tasking.  Gillian also talked a bit about the challenges of and opportunities for educating people about these issues, especially when they are really young.  Meg’s great work on both Acceptable Use Policies in schools and teaching kids about identity, security, and privacy is highly related to these issues as well.

This panel has generated some online chatter:

The Computer World article did a great job of describing some of the generation gap issues in the workplace today and how these manifest in policies around technology and security.  They also translated it into Portuguese (at least we think they did, we can’t read that article.  InfoSecurity also provided some interesting commentary on the panel.  Finally, the CyLab blog from CMU gave probably the most detailed reporting on the event, even going so far as to describe our skits.  For those of you who weren’t there, yes, thats right, there were two skits…. thankfully, they were authored by Gary’s brother Walt McGraw, with help from Gary and Jim.  So, they turned out to be pretty funny, despite the limited acting experience of Gillian and the rest of the panel.