Comparing privacy attitudes of knowledge workers in the U.S. and India
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Intercultural collaboration
Methodological reflections on a field study of a globally distributed software project
Information and Software Technology
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Awareness of the activities of one's collaborators is crucial for effective and efficient collaboration. In loosely coupled collaborations, particularly those distributed across time and distance, such awareness is impoverished. Interpersonal Awareness and Interactions Systems (IAIS) aim to foster awareness and overcome the impoverishment. Promoting awareness, however, is in tension with the individuals' desire for privacy. We explored how the privacy-sensitivity of IAIS can be improved by empowering the users to reconcile privacy desires with awareness needs. Our investigation started with Instant Messaging (IM) as a representative case of IAIS and expanded to a corporate awareness application that incorporates multiple aspects of awareness. Finally, we engaged in a field study of a large, geographically distributed software development project to broaden our scope to the entire ecology of IAIS utilized in loosely coupled collaboration. We show that the desire for impression management is an underlying cause of the desire for privacy in technology-mediated interpersonal interactions – both directly as well as indirectly via a causal link with the desire for visibility (to oneself) of one's IAIS-projected impression. We also provide a framework that describes how privacy management in loosely coupled collaboration operates. The framework lists important situational characteristics (viz., issues, relationships, temporality, technology, and space) and interpretive influences (viz., self, team, site, organization, and cultural environment) that are grounded in our data. Further, we identify differences in interpersonal privacy concerns among collaborators in the U.S. and India and describe five factors that lead to the observed differences: physical characteristics of the workplace, nature of interpersonal relationships, conceptualization of privacy, intra-team competition, and management style and hierarchy. The research generated several design suggestions for improving the reconciliation of privacy and awareness in IAIS. We describe the prototype we implemented to demonstrate the designs. Specifically, the prototype adds the functionalities of notice, negotiation, control over conversation archives, expiration of contacts, encryption of channels and archives, visualization of collective activities, and group-level preference specification. Users concur that our enhancements provide improved support for privacy management.