Enhancing Mobile Content Privacy with Proxemics Aware Notifications and Protection

Abstract

Given the widespread adoption of mobile devices and the private personal and work information they carry, casual or deliberate shoulder surfing is an increasing concern with these devices. We iteratively designed a tablet interface that detects when people nearby are looking at the screen, providing awareness through glyph notifications, and response through visual protections, and evaluated its use in two experiments. The results indicate that mobile content privacy management systems such as ours could help alleviate the cognitive and social burden of managing mobile device privacy in dynamic settings. We identify physical privacy behaviours and preferences that can inform the design of privacy notification and management protocols on mobile devices. We argue that such systems require subtlety so as not to advertise the users' intention for privacy, flexibility in addressing dynamic privacy needs and trustworthiness to promote adoption.