A Conceptual Model and a Metaphor of Everyday Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Abstract. We present a unified model of everyday privacy in ubiquitous computing environments, designed to aid system designers and administrators in conceptualizing the end-user privacy experience. The model accounts for the influence of societal-scale forces, contextual factors, and subjective perception on end-user privacy. We identify notice and consent as the fair information practices of greatest everyday utility to users, as they gradually engender the user’s conceptual model of ubicomp privacy. Navigating the regular deluge of personal information collection events in ubicomp requires that notice be minimally intrusive and consent be implicitly granted by a persistent, situation-specific set of user preferences. We extend our model into an interactional metaphor called situational faces, designed to mitigate the complexity of privacy for the end-user. When encountering a situation, a user engages the appropriate face, a metaphorical abstraction of a set of privacy preferences.