Shane Ahern

Over-exposed?: privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing

As sharing personal media online becomes easier and widely spread, new privacy concerns emerge - especially when the persistent nature of the media and associated context reveals details about the physical and social context in which the media items were created. In a first-of-its-kind study, we use context-aware camerephone devices to examine privacy decisions in mobile and online photo sharing. Through data analysis on a corpus of privacy decisions and associated context data from a real-world system, we identify relationships between location of photo capture and photo privacy settings. Our data analysis leads to further questions which we investigate through a set of interviews with 15 users. The interviews reveal common themes in privacy considerations: security, social disclosure, identity and convenience. Finally, we highlight several implications and opportunities for design of media sharing applications, including using past privacy patterns to prevent oversights and errors.

MMM2: mobile media metadata for photo sharing

Though cameraphones are rapidly becoming the dominant platform for consumer digital photography, users still face difficulties in transferring, managing, and sharing photos captured with cameraphones. The Mobile Media Metadata 2 (MMM2) system removes the difficulty in transferring photos from the device by providing an automatic upload capability and uses metadata about the context in which a photo was captured to simplify photo management and streamline the sharing process. In our MMM2 system, we have leveraged collaborative filtering techniques to infer the likely sharing recipients for photos based on contextual metadata, which allows the system to accurately guess likely share recipients for a photo and present them to the photographer at the time of capture.

Zurfer: mobile multimedia access in spatial, social and topical context

What happens when you can access all the worlds media, but the access is constrained by screen size, bandwidth, attention, and battery life? We present a novel mobile context-aware software prototype that enables access to images on the go. Our prototype utilizes the channel metaphor to give users contextual access to media of interest according to key dimensions: spatial, social, and topical. Our experimental prototype attempts to be playful and simple to use, yet provide powerful and comprehensive media access. A temporally-driven sorting scheme for media items allows quick and easy access to items of interest in any dimension. For ad-hoc tasks, we extend the application with keyword search to deliver the long tail of media and images. Elements of social interaction and communication around the photographs are built into the mobile application, to increase user engagement. The application utilizes Flickr.com as an image and social-network data source, but could easily be extended to support other websites and media formats.