The Awareness-Privacy Tradeoff in Video Supported Informal Awareness: A Study of Image-Filtering Based Techniques

Media space applications that promote informal awareness in an organization confront an inevitable paradox: the shared video connections between offices and rooms that promote informal awareness also can rob individuals of privacy. An important open problem in this area is how to foster awareness of colleagues without the accompanying loss of privacy. One proposal put forward is to filter the communicated video streams rather than broadcasting clear video. In this article, we describe several image-filtering techniques that may provide awareness in informal group communication applications while blurring the details of an individual’s activities, thus potentially preserving more privacy. We describe experiments to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the degrees of awareness and accuracy that these filtering techniques provide.