Avoiding “Big Brother” Anxiety with Progressive Self- Management of Ubiquitous Computing Services Kevin Feeney, Dave Lewis, Kris McGlinn, Declan O’Sullivan Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin {kefeeney|dlewis|d.osullivan|mcglinnk}@cs.tcd.ie Anne Holohan Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin aholohan@tcd.ie ABSTRACT Despite the significant research over the last ten years, commercial ubiquitous computing environments and pervasive applications remain thin on the ground. This paper looks at the explosion in application creativity on the internet in recent years – the so-called ‘web 2.0’ – in order to identify the obstacles to application creativity in ubiquitous computing. Although technological and standardisation advances are progressively diminishing the scale of the technical problems in the domain, how to manage such applications in such a way so as to encourage user-acceptance remains an open question. It is a question that is particularly difficult due to the serious privacy concerns and the need for negotiated management of services between users due to physically embedded nature of sensor-driven applications. We describe a technical platform which is designed to allow users of ubiquitous computing environments to manage their own personal data and share it in a controlled way and describe an experimental programme to measure the relationship between users’ perception of how much control they can exercise over their personal data and their acceptance of ubiquitous computing applications. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems – human factors; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organisation Interfaces – collaborative computing, organizational design, evaluation / methodology; H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia Information Systems – artificial, augmented and virtual realities. General Terms Management, Measurement, Design, Experimentation, Security, Human Factors. 1 Keywords Ubiquitous Computing, Simulation, Collaborative Management, Privacy Management, Policy Based Management. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MobiQuitous 2008, July 21-25, 2008, Dublin, Ireland. Copyright © 2008 ICST ISBN 978-963-9799-27-1 1. INTRODUCTION Although Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) environments, which make use of embedded sensors to deliver more intelligent user-services have been a topic of research for over a decade, there have been few serious attempts to develop commercially viable implementations. Successful ubiquitous user-applications are generally limited to particulars devices (e.g. mobile phones, Ipods). This is a consequence of characteristics of UbiComp environments which present particular difficulties for designers and administrators of services. This paper looks at the relative dearth of innovative UbiComp applications and contrasts this with the large amount of creative and innovative applications which have been enabled on the web by “Web 2.0” technological and social advances. One important barrier that UbiComp developers have faced is the lack of technological stability and a standardised platform compared to what is now available to web-developers. However, advances in mobile device and sensor technology have started to address some of the underlying technical problems. For example, the proliferation of Java Virtual Machines has provided something of a common platform for service developers, while Wi-Fi (802.11x) is becoming much more widely available, even on simple embedded sensor chips. The advent of Open APIs and open-source development methods has also eliminated some of the important barriers to innovation. While many of the obvious technical barriers are being actively addressed, there remain significant problems which stem from the business, social and organisational impacts of UbiComp capabilities. From a business point of view, the major problem is that there are very few commercially successful examples of UbiComp services. From an organisational point of view, one problem particular to the domain is the fact that applications may make use of devices and networks that are owned and operated by a wide range of different groups and individuals. For example, a UbiComp service may make use of a user’s PDA to convey messages derived from the environment to the user. Thus, UbiComp service designers cannot make any general assumptions about the ownership of the various devices which participate in delivering their services to users. Some devices may be personal, others may be embedded in the user’s environment and operated by third parties. UbiComp service providers need to deal with environments where the authority over the available resources in any particular setting is diffuse. In terms of traditional network management, UbiComp environments present potentially extreme examples of multi-domain management. Finally, from a social point of view, sensor data provided by UbiComp environments