Taming the wolf in sheep's clothing: privacy in multimedia communications

Abstract

When ubiquitous multimedia technology is introduced in an organization, the privacy implications of that technology are rarely addressed. Users usually extend the trust they have in an organization to the technology it employs. This paper reports results from interviews with 24 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) attendees whose presentations or contributions to IETF sessions were transmitted on the multicast backbone (Mbone). Due to a high level of trust in the organization, these users had few initial concerns about the privacy implications of this technology. However, interviewees' trust relied on inaccurate assumptions, since the interviews revealed a number of potential and actual invasions of privacy in transmission, recording and editing of multicast data. Previous research found that users who experience an unexpected invasion of their privacy are not only likely to reject the technology that afforded the invasion, but lose trust in the organization that introduced it [2,3]. We discuss a number of mechanisms and policies for protecting users' privacy in this particular application, and propose a strategy for introducing networked multimedia technology in general.