Pervasive Consent
Luger & Rodden (2013) address the issue of consent in ubiquitous systems in their paper ‘An Informed View on Consent in Ubicomp’. The authors question whether traditional models of consent are suitable for ubiquitous systems, and if not, how should consent be approached. Commonly, a process of consent involves a user allowing a service to use their data as the service sees fit; this action would occur when the user first registers with the service and they would then not engage with the consent process again throughout their use of the service. The authors argue that this should not be the whole process of consent for ubiquitous systems, especially given the separation of user and service in pervasive systems, and also services that users would come to rely on in their daily actions.
Luger & Rodden (2013) conduct elite interviews to identify whether this process should continue, or if new guidelines for consent in such systems can be designed. The researchers conduct their study through a series of 20 elite interviews with experts from a range of fields including Ubicomp and consent. The interviews focused on the questions of: ‘To what extent is is consent, as currently defined in system design, transferable to ubiquitous systems?’; and ’What new forms of consent might be useful and how might these be realised?’.
The results from these interviews created two definitions for consent. Some saw consent as reducible to a contract, whereas, some took the view consent was a ritual form of protecting individual rights, freedoms, and one’s self. A key concern was of comprehension in a traditional consent model, stating that in the brief moment consent is addressed information is not conveyed effectively to the user. In this is instance it could be said a users may be giving consent to something entirely different to what they think they are agreeing to. The researchers found a quarter of the experts they interviewed agreed that the traditional model of consent is not appropriate for ubiquitous systems and was in need of revision.
In context aware ubiquitous systems consent should be a key concern especially with the notion of such systems relying on our private data, mentioned in Rogers (2006)’s critique of calm computing and in Weiser (1991)’s Computer for the 21st Century. The authors put forward a framework of pushing consent as a social process, developing informing, designing for consent, and reconnecting user’s with their data. These points push attention towards informing users and being much more explicit in the systems’s intentions. Whilst this is a more appropriate form of consent in context aware systems this should not be a blanket design, especially given a focus on helping vulnerable people, who may not be able to understand the extra information, with context aware systems in Ubicomp.
The paper I have chosen for next week is Costa, Adams, Jung, Guimberti ́ere & Choudhury (2016)’s ‘EmotionCheck: Leveraging Bodily Signals and False Feedback to Regulate our Emotions’. I think this paper faces some of the major issues surrounding consent and privacy as highlighted in Luger & Rodden (2013) as Costa et al. (2016) relies on false feedback and personal data, making it almost impossible to give informed consent to such as system.
References
Costa, J., Adams, A. T., Jung, M. F., Guimberti ́ere, F. & Choudhury, T. (2016), ‘EmotionCheck: Leveraging bodily signals and false feedback to regulate our emotions’, Ubicomp pp. 758–769. URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2971648.2971752
Luger, E. & Rodden, T. (2013), ‘An informed view on consent for UbiComp’, Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international joint . . . pp. 529–538.
URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2493446
Rogers, Y. (2006), ‘Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing:
engaging UbiComp experiences’, Ubicomp ’06 pp. 404–421.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11853565_24
Weiser, M. (1991), ‘The computer for the 21st century’, Mobile Computing and Communications Review 3(3), 3–11.
URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=329124.329126
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