Can Privacy-Aware Lifelogs Alter Our Memories?

Elagroudy, Passant; Khamis, Mohamed; Mathis, Florian; Irmscher, Diana; Bulling, Andreas and Schmidt, Albrecht (2019): Can Privacy-Aware Lifelogs Alter Our Memories? In: Chi Ea '19 Extended Abstracts: Extended Abstracts of the 2019 Chi Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Abstract

The abundance of automatically-triggered lifelogging cameras is a privacy threat to bystanders. Countering this by deleting photos limits relevant memory cues and the informative content of lifelogs. An alternative is to obfuscate bystanders, but it is not clear how this impacts the lifelogger's recall of memories. We report on a study in which we compare viewing 1) unaltered photos, 2) photos with blurred people, and 3) a subset of the photos after deleting private ones, on memory recall. Findings show that obfuscated content helps users recall a lot of content, but it also results in recalling less accurate details, which can sometimes mislead the user. Our work informs the design of privacy-aware lifelogging systems that maximizes recall and steers discussion about ubiquitous technologies that could alter human memories.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Computer Science
• Subjects: 000 Computer science, information and general works > 004 Data processing computer science
• Language: English