H.: Threat Awareness - Social Impacts of Privacy Aware Ubiquitous Computing

At first glance, privacy and ubiquitous computing seem to be highly incompatible, due to the ubicomp characteristic of being invisible. There are projects, trying to overcome this problem with different feedback mechanisms. In current literature, this approach is often referred to as privacy mirrors. The goal is to provide privacy awareness. It means making users aware about how their data is used by a specific service. However, there is little scientific work on the social impact of privacy awareness. That is, if privacy awareness is useful, accepted by the users and if it changes their usage behavior. Therefore, in this work, we examined the influence of privacy awareness on users to find the answers. We performed a user study with a privacy aware mobile service and conducted an online survey, which lead to interesting results, which we will present in this paper