A framework for privacy support in group information management systems

Abstract

As the use of group information management systems (GIMs) for various personal and professional purposes gets widespread, the issue of providing usable support for managing access to the vast amount of user-created content in such open environments becomes more of a concern. This work describes our user-centered approach to developing a framework for designing usable privacy management mechanisms in GIM context. A grounded theory study was conducted, aimed at identifying privacy factors in GIM context from users' perspective. Based on these factors, we propose a design framework for building privacy management mechanisms for GIMs that are usable to the ordinary, non-technical users. Current work includes applying the proposed framework in a real-world GIM system to create a test bed for our framework. Still to come is the evaluation of the resulted privacy management system to see how successful it is in satisfying users' privacy needs.