Iachello, G., Smith, I., Consolvo, S., Chen, M., Aboud, G.

This paper introduces Reno and Boise, two social networking applications for finding out where friends are for happenstance meetings or general status knowledge. The applications are both built on the Placeware framework (from Intel), and Reno is a lighter-weight text message based system while Boise has maps as well as group-contact features. The system supports “friend” level interaction (from family members down to acquantainces / bosses — the people that are in your phone’s address book).

Some quick conclusions:

1. partiticapnts would disclose either everything (fully specified location) or nothing at all.
2. The participants also did a Westin/Harris Privacy Segmentation Model and this was not a predictor for how users would respond to requests (i.e., for friendship, this model is bupkis).
3. It takes users a long time to get used to these applications — longer term (3+ weeks) evaluations are needed.

The paper has some design guidelines and lessons learned about these applications:

1. Don’t build in lots of automation support: Useres didn’t use the automated features designed.
2. Flexible replies: User control of what information gets sent.
3. Support Denial of Requests: Ability to Ignore Requests
4. Support Deception: Ability to spoof location replies.
5. Suport Simple Evasion: Baseline evasive reply of “busy.”
6. Start with Person-to-Person Communication: one-to-one before groups (many-to-many).
7. Status / Away Messages: Provide a way of signalling “busy” as a user-definable mode. This is an analog to the status messages found in IM clients.
8. Operators: Avoid Handling User Data: Phone companies should not be the keeper of the data; leave it on the user’s phone. This is for regulatory as well as for acceptance concerns.