The TV Is Watching You Gunnar Harboe Motorola 1295 East Algonquin Road Schaumburg, IL 60196, USA 847-576-1207 gunnar.harboe@motorola.com ABSTRACT There are serious privacy concerns around social television. Users’ privacy may be threatened by the government, corporations, illicit intruders, and strangers. However, the most urgent privacy issues relate to people’s friends and family. Users worry about how others will judge their TV viewing, and want to maintain confidence in and confidentiality of their conversations through the system. Designing for these issues involves giving users control over their self-presentation, support for multiple users, and employing constructive ambiguity. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. General Terms Design, Security, Human Factors. Keywords social television, privacy, TV presence, communication, porn, big brother, impersonation, ambiguity, persistence, multi-user. 1. INTRODUCTION Social television, a combination of technologies that enable social experiences around TV content, is positively received by many potential users [3][10]. However, the concept also raises grave privacy concerns. In a focus group study by Motorola Labs [6], many participants sum up their privacy concerns in the term “Big Brother” and other references to Nineteen Eighty-Four [9]. Orwell’s novel indeed features an example of social television, in the form of a combination TV set and video camera: The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. […] The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. 2. WHO WATCHES THE VIEWERS? For users of social television, threats to their privacy come from a number of sources: government and law-enforcement, corporations, strangers, people in their social networks, and people who share the home and TV. The government surveillance issues for Social TV are in many respects similar to those for other telecommunications technologies, such as email or telephone. In addition to the communication dimension, many social television concepts involve TV presence, which implies the ability to monitor content consumption. This can be seen as analogous to accessing library records. The conditions under which the government can legitimately monitor this information must be settled by law, but the decision is influenced by technological choices, such as where the data is stored. Corporations are interested in the information generated by Social TV use mainly for the purpose of analytics. Sharing TV presence with a social network provides a convenient alibi for tracking TV viewing in unprecedented detail, which is valuable information for advertisers. One of the companies exploring Social TV analytics is Google [5], and its and other web companies’ businesses have shown that users are willing to share their personal information in exchange for a free service, and as long as the information is used anonymously or in aggregate form. Another consideration is that both government and corporate databases are vulnerable to leaks and intrusion. Hackers are just one example of how unknown, private individuals can pose a threat to users’ privacy. Some focus group participants were worried about spammers, online stalkers, and of strangers contacting their children. There was a strong preference for limiting all communication to people already in their social network. However, these people, the very friends and family that Social TV systems would allow users to communicate with, are also the people that participants have the most privacy concerns about. I will discuss these concerns in more detail. 3. WE KNOW WHAT YOU WATCH In our focus groups, as in other studies [1],[8], the feature that caused the most unease was television presence, the ability to tell what others are watching on TV. The participants worried about others being able to see what they were watching at any given time. Most argued that this social transparency overstepped the boundaries of acceptability: “Would I want someone to know what I was watching? Really. It’s kind of private.” 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. Conference’04, Month 1–2, 2004, City, State, Country. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.