User Oriented Machines

At the Science and Technology Committee, The Knesset

erant — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:52:55 +0000

The Science and Technology Knesset committee had discussed privacy in location-based services, following similar discussions in the U.S. Congress and in the EU. Parts of my testimony is quoted in the news coverage of Calcalist below (Hebrew).

http://www.calcalist.co.il/internet/articles/0,7340,L-3552588,00.html

Best paper award to our Super-Ego!

erant — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:53:38 +0000

Our paper, “Super-Ego: A Framework for Privacy-Sensitive Bounded Context-Awareness“, had won the best paper award in CASEMANS 2011! The paper describes a method for deciding automatically which places a person might like to share with others. We try to study the effectiveness of manual intervention in this process, and find out that just by passing a small fraction of devisions to the user, the efficiency of the algorithm greatly improve.

Why I am uninstalling BranchOut

erant — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:11:01 +0000

BranchOut, the new Facebook-embedded professional social network for professional relations. In short, linked-in riding your Facebook network. Its not a bad idea, and it seems to get some traction around my social network.

However, I think that most BranchOut users would be surprised to see that their information is shared with “everyone”, including recruiting companies. Go to BranchOut -> Pull the combo under your picture -> Settings -> Privacy Settings, and then you would be able to see that the default privacy settings for BranchOut is:

Why is this a problem? As BranchOut is a Facebook application, I would expect that information that I pass to BranchOut would be shared according to my Facebook sharing preferences. Their privacy policy says that they share “just” BranchOut information. However, this is private enough, and includes the people you connect with on BranchOut, past positions, and education.

How Google loses social context again

erant — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:40:36 +0000

Just saw this little UI nugget from Google on a result page:

It seems that Google is trying to link my Twitter account to my Google profile, for personalization purposes. However, the fact that it appeared in the search results page is somewhat disturbing. This is not the context we regularly relate to social applications, such as Twitter.

After clicking on “yes”, I got this option:

I refused that option: I can never understand Google profiles.

Government engaging in social networks should start thinking about privacy

erant — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 10:59:25 +0000

Government agencies are slowly starting to engage citizens in online social networks, following politicians and commercial companies. I recently gave a lecture about privacy in online social networks (in Hebrew). The lecture focuses on the particular viewpoint of a government agency operating in Facebook or Twitter.

Privacy for Government Engagement in Social Networks (Hebrew) http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=talktochprivacyfinal-110310070904-phpapp01&stripped_title=privacy-for-government-engagement-in-social-networks-hebrew&userName=erant

View more presentations from Eran Toch

Crowd-sourcing you off your privacy

erant — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:12:23 +0000

The new Web app from Gigapan and the World Series Web site is pretty cool. It allows you to tag your friends in a hugh, zoom-able photo of the audience in the world series. Here is a link. However, the privacy premises here are pretty murky. The photo is taken by one party in some point in time. The people in the photo most likely do not take notice, as it is taken so far away. Other people, a third party, are tagging the people in their photo, again without their notice. Its probably fun for most people, but some might not like it that much. How much control do a photographed person has in the context of this technology?

Tagging people in a Gigapan photo

Even more alarmingly, it is an example how crowd-sourcing might be used for identifying people in a large scale. In this photo alone, 2718 people were tagged during the course of a day.

Private places and the feeling of being tracked

erant — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:49:15 +0000

Recently, I presented our paper “Empirical models of privacy in location sharing” (PDF) in Ucibomp – a great conference about mobile computing. The idea behind the paper is to study what type of privacy preferences people assign to distinct places in location sharing scenarios (e.g., when using applications such as Foursquare, Facebook Places and Google Latitude). In order to study this question, we asked 28 people to use our location sharing application, Locaccino, with their actual friends for a month. We found out that people are more likely to share places with high entropy: places which are visited frequently by a diverse population. Entropy is a super-easy method for predicting which places will be shared. Also, we have seen that users who visit lots of low entropy places are more likely to have more privacy concerns and more restrictive privacy preferences. The work is a collaboration with Justin Cranshaw and many others form Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

Here are the slides from the conference:

Here is a map of Pittsburgh which distinct between high entropy and low entropy places:

Entropy in Pittsburgh

And here is a graph showing the relation between place entropy, how comfortable users will be sharing their location, and the categorization of places (we asked the users to do that…):

Entropy vs. Comfort in sharing location

Usable Copenhagen

erant — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 09:16:32 +0000

I have just returned from Ubicomp 2010, which was set up in Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen is an amazing place, famous for its cycling culture, where 38% of the people commute daily by cycling. The city strikes me as very usable, much in the same way that a tool or a computer program is usable and friendly. Here are some examples showing the small ways that Copenhagen is easy to use by visitors and residents.

Cycling and need to cross some stairs? Not to worry - just push them on these metal slide.

Usable security: all bikes have these build-in locks. Easy to handle, but not hard to break though.

Sliding escalators can be used by bikers, people with strollers, and disabled people.

Need to rest? Lots of the elevators have these small folding benches.

Kids are very welcome in Denmark. You can just grab a stroller in Copenhagen's airport.

Worst Billing User Interface Ever

erant — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:18:08 +0000

There is nothing more relaxing than this billing user interface:

Its the final checkout button of my healthcare provider’s (UPMC) billing system. Really, they could have solved the multiple submit button in so many ways. Its not that surprising, actually. Healthcare providers’s default mode is to over charge the patient, and then back off if the patient complains. So, this is just another example of how user interfaces reflect the organization’s psych. Cute.

My new Kindle: a machine for concentration

erant — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 01:57:58 +0000

For some reason, the hype around the iPad encouraged me to get a Kindle. When the iPad first came out, it looked to me as the natural future of of personal computing. As I have an iPhone, I envisioned how using the iPad would feel like, and imagined myself laying on the sofa, and happily multitasking between viewing movies on Netflix, reading and writing papers.

However, after playing around with the iPad, I wondered if I could really sit down, concetrate and do something productive with the iPad. Would Netflix win over more boring tasks, like reading research papers? Would the constant stream from Twitter, email, Facebook, Foursquare, and the like drown the stuff that I really want to write? Would news sites win over books? Today’s computers and gadgets make it hard to concentrate. Nicholas Carr summed it up nicely in his article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid“:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

It makes quite a lot of sense. The iPad is a multi-purpose platform aimed mainly for content consumption. In this setting, the most interesting, easy-to-consume, and fast-changing applications are bound to win. The New York Times has a great piece, telling the story of Kord Campbell, who multitasks to the point that he cannot do any single thing right. This is his insane desktop.

I have decided to revolt by buying a Kindle, the technology for the elderly. I got it by mail two weeks ago, and here are some observations. First, its a lovable gadget. Like the iPhone, the iPad, and, well, some other Apple products, its a focused product which is easy to like and even love. It feels great in your hands. You can hold it effortlessly in one hand. The result is a very natural piece of technology, which allows the user to forget the technical details, and to focus on reading. Forgetting the technical details is easy: the user do not need to charge it very often, books and newspapers magically appear in the morning, and the “next page” key is positioned where your fingers lie. It is very easy just to read.

Other operations are hard. As Jacob Nielsen notes in his Kindle usability review, searching and navigating is not as easy. Lots of user interface problems are rooted is the slow E-Ink display. It takes a while for the screen to refresh. It makes very trivial operations, such as highlighting menu selections, very cumbersome. Browsing the Web, for example, is ridiculous. It brought back memories of 1994. However, there is some blessing in the curse. The price paid for navigating away is higher than in a standard computer. It takes time to switch to another content. Therefore, a user might feel less motivated to navigate away.

The Kindle gives the user less options, but that is a key component in concentration.