Section 19.2. Privacy and HCI

19.2. Privacy and HCI

This chapter necessarily juggles two somewhat amorphous terms: HCI and privacy. HCI has already been introduced, along with its core concerns of improving ease of use and the overall user experience. Privacy is an even broader term. Unlike HCI, it is a term in everyday language, and so its meanings are rooted in larger cultural practices and understandings. It has technical meanings in, for example, law, ethics, and social theory, but also engenders strong, emotional connotations in common usage and daily experience. Many of these meanings are different and, at times, even contradictory.

For the purposes of this chapter, a simple but useful definition of privacy is:

As such, privacy is about individuals' capabilities in a particular social situation to control what they consider to be personal data. Although fairly simple, this definition immediately raises a number of important points:

• Privacy is based on information and the effectiveness of individuals in controlling its flow, and so has a natural relationship with the concerns of HCI (as well as with the field of computer security). Indeed, as systems have increasingly involved the processing of personal information , particularly in the context of financial and governmental transactions, issues of privacy have naturally risen in prominence within the field of HCI.

• Privacy, like security, concerns risk, its perception, and its management. Privacy problems often lie in the potential future consequences of present behavior, which may be deemed risky or safe according to standards of judgment (not necessarily those of the participants involved). As such, privacy harkens back to HCI's origins in ergonomics and the safe operation of complex machinery.

• Privacy is about control, trust, and power in social situations, and so it rapidly implies ethical, political, and legal issues. It appeals to notions of individual autonomy and freedom: control of one's person, and access to one's person, in the form of personal information.^[4] But this freedom is almost always constrained and may often have to be traded off in certain transactions, such as to access credit or to maintain the quality of health care.^[5] These are, in general, issues for social, behavioral, and political science, but HCI does include many useful examples of interdisciplinary applied research.^[6]

  ^[4] Irving Altman, The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory and Crowding. (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1975).

  ^[5] Roger Clarke, "Introduction to Dataveillance and Information Privacy, and Definition of Terms";http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/Intro.html.

  ^[6] For example, see Chapter 24 and Chapter 25, this volume.

As this chapter will argue, privacy is individually subjective and socially situated. Indeed, privacy, as part of social interaction in general, is not a unified experience. What may be privacy for people involved in e-commerce or online banking may be a very different problem for people involved in social computing. In the following sections, we will see that people differ widely in their attitudes as well. That is, people's experience of privacy, their expectations and goals, and their problems concerning privacy may all differ when moving among areas of computation, society, and even tasks. We'll leave further discussion of the definitional problems inherent in "privacy" to other authors in this book, and use Culnan's broad definition. As we have seen, it suggests prima facie similarities between the concerns of HCI and of privacy at a number of different levels. It raises important issues as well, particularly regarding the irreducibility of privacy concerns to purely functional issues of efficiency and ease of use. The broader conceptions of HCI will be needed to deal with complex real-world social and ethical issues like privacy.