OBSERVERS’ PRIVACY CONCERNS ABOUT WEARABLE CAMERAS

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OBSERVERS’ PRIVACY CONCERNS ABOUT WEARABLE CAMERAS

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.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Wearable cameras, one of the most popular technology novelties to emerge in recent years, are fitted up with various sensors that can collect a wide range of private information about end-users in real-time including their location, image, voice, health condition and so on. This level of personal information contrasts to that available in earlier devices such as surveillance systems, digital cameras and smartphones. Although wearable cameras have not been purchased and used by large numbers of people, the society, and even governments have begun to pose controversial issues about their use. For instance, some privacy rights groups question what

Google will do with the personal and environment information collected form the users (E. Ackerman, 2013). Meese argues that relevant laws should be enacted laws of privacy because of emergency of Google Glass (Meese, 2014). The press has even reported cases of assault and abuse of who were using wearable lifelogging cameras (Wolf et al., 2014). As a result, it is essential for researchers from multiple disciplines to investigate the use and implications of these new wearable devices that include the wearable camera.

Previous research has explored the user’s concerns about wearable devices, and how to improve users’ acceptance and experiences of these devices (Lee et al., 2015; Spagolli et al., 2014). For example, Lee’s group found that the users concerned a lot about their sensitive personal information to be collected the device, and their concern differed according to who would be the final data recipient (Lee, 2015). While these studies have already provided frameworks for design of wearable devices and developed a number of features and prototypes aimed at protecting the security and privacy of information collected, only a few of them discuss the observer’s attitude and acceptance as well as their privacy concerns of these devices (Denning et al., 2014; Singhal, 2016). Moreover, the previous work has not clarified which specific dimensions raise the largest privacy concerns by observers, or which kinds of wearable camera scenarios are most likely to worry observers..

To address this research gap, we conducted a deeper and more detailed investigation of about observers’ privacy concerns relating to wearable cameras. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, we probed hypothetical observers’ privacy concerns relating to wearable cameras in several different scenarios, including the reasons for holding these concerns. We built a series of scenarios based on actions and locations that we expected to trigger varying degrees of privacy concern, and a series of questions were asked following description of each scenario. We examine the impact factors identified by previous studies and explore how the dimensions of concern and types of information differ across different scenarios. Further, we sought to determine if the predicted attitudes would be different if the wearable cameras are employed as assistive technology or as safety-assuring mechanisms rather than an individual consumer product.

We propose to answer three research questions here:

1.! What is the observers’ perception of potential privacy concerns about the wearable camera when someone else is using it, across a range of scenarios varying in location and information sensitivity?
2.! Which types of information are of most concern across these scenarios, and what aspects of each situation trigger the greatest concerns?
3.! In what situations might wearable cameras be seen as more acceptable to

observers even before these devices becomes common in our daily lives? This study gives researchers and designers inspiration of further studies on how to consider trade-offs when attempting to consider the experiences of both direct stakeholders (users) and indirect stakeholders (observers) in situations where wearable cameras are present. For product design teams in wearable device companies, observers’ and users’ perception of a new product are related to their potential market and revenue. They should also make the trade-off in product design according to the result of the study that some technologies will be convenient to users but resisted by observers and people who care social ethics. If society will resist the eventual product, design results may be banned by laws and policies of the future. For academic research groups, they can take the scenarios we examined in this study into account when they are exploring scenarios of wearable camera use. Also, similar studies might adapt the methods we use here to explore an even broader set of use cases. This study will help expand this research field, and demonstrate usable insights for future development and promotion the cutting-edge AR and ubiquitous computing devices.

Thesis Structure

The thesis is organized in the following way: Chapter Two presents the literature review of previous studies about privacy of surveillance systems, privacy of wearable cameras and frameworks of information privacy. Chapter Three previews the research question and research design. Chapter Four includes the method and qualitative data analysis results of focus group interview. Chapter Five shows the method and results of quantitative data analysis of online survey. Chapter Six discusses the effect of observers’ personal characteristics that were encoded and analyzed as covariates. At last, Chapter Seven presents the high-level discussion and insights

as well as conclusion and limitation of this study.

OBSERVERS’ PRIVACY CONCERNS ABOUT WEARABLE CAMERAS

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