Control, Deception, and Communication: Evalutatin the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service

Control, Deception, and Communication: Evalutatin the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service, Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Gregory Abowd, Jeff Hughes, James Howard, Fred Potter, James Scott, Timothy Sohn, Jeffrey Hightower and Anthony LaMarca.

This study is specifically aimed at investigating the need for and effectiveness of automatic location disclosure mechanisms, the emerging strategies to achieve plausible deniability, and at understanding how place and activity are used to communicate plans, intentions and provide awareness. The results show a lack of value of automatic messaging functions, confirm the need for supporting plausible deniability in communications, and highlight the prominent use of activity instead of place to indicate one’s location.

The authors are particularly interested in location-enhanced applications, because location plays a fundamental role in accomplishing everyday communication and coordination tasks. For example, studies agree that one of the most frequent uses of SMS is to coordinate and schedule meetings, for which location plays a significant role. They have developed Reno, a location-enhanced messaging application for Nokia Series 60 phones (GSM positioning) that allows the user to request the location of other users and tell his/her location to them. Reno uses SMS messages to communicate.

The outcomes are:
- The participants did not want automatic features. When asked about the amount of messages sent and received daily, no participants mentioned being overwhelmed by the number of requests. When ask for the reason about the reasons for not configuring automatic features, some participants mentioned that they were not confident of how the features would work in practice. There was also a lack of trust “I felt like sometimes it would be wrong”, and loss of control “it’s just like, y’know, the phone is taking over”.

- All participants viewed Reno as an enhanced messaging application, rather than strictly a location-enhanced service.

- People want to deceive, or deny replies, from time to time, for purpose that are important to them. People decide whether to disclose information about their activities and location based on the indentity of the requester more than on the situation in which this happens.

- In Reno, imprecision and ambiguity afford a space of privacy