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Poster

Balancing Privacy and Awareness needs in Distributed Software Development

Student: Sameer Patil

Advisor: Alfred Kobsa

Abstract: Increasingly, software development teams comprise individual members who are geographically distributed across buildings, cities, countries or even continents. In order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of such collaborative software development, team members need information about the various activities of the other members. Such information may then be utilized to determine who needs to be consulted, when they could be contacted, and how. However, this need for distributing as much information about the activities, work and routines of individual team members, even with peers, is quite frequently at odds with the individual needs and desires for privacy. Our survey of past research literature on privacy suggests that privacy - owing to its highly personal, context-sensitive and nuanced nature - remains highly debated, so much so that there is no single definition of what privacy is. This is underscored by our study comparing the privacy features provided by four different instant messaging systems. Even in simple systems such as these there is considerable variation in the underlying privacy policies and also in the mechanisms through which they are implemented. We suggest that any system designed to support privacy must essentially be a socio-technical one. It should empower the user or groups of users to seamlessly (and continually) negotiate about, adapt and fit the system features and mechanisms for their particular privacy needs; yet having as little an impact as possible on the quality of corresponding awareness information.

Bio: Sameer Patil is a Ph.D. student in the Interactive and Collaborative Technologies (ICT) group in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Sameer holds Master's degrees in Computer Science & Engineering and in Information from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bombay, India.