Grounding Privacy with Awareness: A Social Approach to Describe Privacy Related Issues in Awareness Systems

Abstract

By their very nature, awareness systems bring about an increase in the level of communication between the individuals they connect. Sharing information regarding people’s whereabouts and activities raises privacy concerns, potentially compromising their ability to control who receives what information about them, in what form and at what times. Such privacy concerns can be more pronounced in cases where such information is captured and disclosed automatically, which can lead to unintentional and undesirable disclosure of information (Belloti and Sellen, 1993; Markopoulos, 2005).