19.2. Privacy and HCIThis 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:
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. |