Balancing Privacy and Awareness in Home Media Spaces

Always-on video provides rich levels of awareness for collaborators separated by distance, yet it has the potential to threaten privacy as sensitive details may be broadcast to others. This threat increases for telecommuters who work at home and connect to office-based colleagues using video. Our research addresses the problem of how to develop and evaluate privacy-protecting strategies and user interface design techniques for balancing privacy with awareness in a home media space (HMS)—defined as an always-on video media space used in a home setting. First, we show that image processing techniques alone are unable to balance privacy and awareness for typical home situations involving a telecommuter. Second, using social-psychological theory, we develop a design framework for a privacy-preserving HMS. Third, we present the prototype design of a context-aware HMS, designed to balance privacy and awareness for telecommuters and others in the home.