Y!RB Brain Jam/Y!RB Speakers - CHI2007 Preview: User Studies On Privacy and Tagging in Flickr/ZoneTag April 13, 2007

Free and open to the public - and followed at 4pm with a Social Jam that includes refreshments - and beer. It would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above.

Two topics this week!

Mor Naaman to present:
Over-Exposed Privacy Patterns and Considerations in Online and Mobile Photo Sharing
ABSTRACT:
As sharing personal media online becomes easier and widely spread, new privacy concerns emerge – especially when the persistent nature of the media and associated context reveals details about the physical and social context in which the media items were created. In a first-of-its-kind study, we use context-aware camerephone devices to examine privacy decisions in mobile and online photo sharing. Through data analysis on a corpus of privacy decisions and associated context data from a real-world system, we identify relationships between location of photo capture and photo privacy settings. Our data analysis leads to further questions which we investigate through a set of interviews with 15 users. The interviews reveal common themes in privacy considerations: security, social disclosure, identity and convenience. Finally, we highlight several implications and opportunities for design of media sharing applications, including using past privacy patterns to prevent oversights and errors.

BIOGRAPHY:
Mor Naaman is a research scientist at Yahoo! Research Berkeley.

Morgan Ames to present:
Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media
ABSTRACT:
Why do people tag? Users have mostly avoided annotating media such as photos – both in desktop and mobile environments – despite the many potential uses for annotations, including recall and retrieval. We investigate the incentives for annotation in Flickr, a popular web-based photo-sharing system, and ZoneTag, a cameraphone photo capture and annotation tool that uploads images to Flickr. In Flickr, annotation (as textual tags) serves both personal and social purposes, increasing incentives for tagging and resulting in a relatively high number of annotations. ZoneTag, in turn, makes it easier to tag cameraphone photos that are uploaded to Flickr by allowing annotation and suggesting relevant tags immediately after capture. A qualitative study of ZoneTag/Flickr users exposed various tagging patterns and emerging motivations for photo annotation. We offer a taxonomy of motivations for annotation in this system along two dimensions (sociality and function), and explore the various factors that people consider when tagging their photos. Our findings suggest implications for the design of digital photo organization and sharing applications, as well as other applications that incorporate user-based annotation.

BIOGRAPHY:
Morgan Ames is a PhD student at Stanford, and a research intern at Nokia Research Palo Alto. She peformed this research during his internship at Y!RB.

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Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam is an "almost weekly" speaker series on topics related to media, social media, mobile media, media annotation, and the leftist media. Well, maybe not the last one. To join our mailing list, please visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yrb-bj.

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