Ubiquitous Computing and Privacy Concern

What is ubiquitous computing? In a nutshell it is computing power ‘anywhere any time’. Ultimately, it sends the computer to the background where the user need not to think about the computer. It is precisely this nature that places privacy at risk.

Hong Sheng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, and Keng Siau published a study on ubiquitous computing and privacy in Journal of the Association for Information Systems. The study describes the four fundamental characteristics of ubiquitous computing.

 

Ubiquity          Computers are everywhere, and people are able to access networks and are reachable anytime and anywhere.

 

Universality    The elimination of incompatibility problems caused by the lack of standardization, so people can have universal devices that stay connected all the time regardless of their locations.

 

Uniqueness     Users can be uniquely identified not only by identity and preferences, but also in terms of geographical positions. Uniqueness also incorporates the idea of identification, localization, and portability.

 

Unison              Data integration across different applications so that people have a consistent view of information.

 

From the description of these characteristics, it can be seen that technology is more useful when it provides more personalized services. This is precisely what drives the personalization-privacy paradox. Where privacy can be defined as the right to control the collection and use of information about oneself, it appears that when technology attempts to provide more personalized services customers become more concerned about privacy. This particular study investigated how the concept of situation dependency could alter the personalization-privacy paradox.
 

While user demographics such as age, gender, education, experience, and location  affect how accepting and open a customer is to ubiquitous computing,  in a non-emergency context, the more personalized the service, the more concerned the consumer is about their privacy.  However, in an emergency situation such as an accident, hurricane, or other disaster, personalization is more desired and concern for privacy goes out the window.

Maryellen Bailey