Assignment 10: Video Conference (Lisa Ji)

One of the key concepts from our course so far that I felt was particularly relevant to the video conference we experienced last week was privacy. The Boyle and Greenberg paper that read regarding this issue discussed the three ‘modalities of control’ with regards to privacy: solitude, confidentiality and autonomy. For this blog post I figured I’d do an evaluation of the technology we witnessed with regards to the first modality: solitude.

In terms of solitude, that is, a subject’s control over their interactions, it seems the technology has handled it well. In their paper, Boyle and Greenberg defined solitude as specifically when, where, and the frequency at which interactions take place. The technology we witnessed seems to take that first element, when, particularly seriously. Users have the ability to mute themselves, or even turn off their cameras whenever they feel the need. Although at one point we did dial in to a professor’s unoccupied office, and watched them come in and leave without being aware they we were there, the representative from the company did say that automatically answering calls was a setting that could be changed. To facilitate this modality even more however, it could be cool to have the program contact your cell phone whenever anyone is dialing in, in the event you aren’t actually there, or forgot to turn the auto-answer setting off. A feature like that would give them even more control over when interactions take place.

I feel the biggest problem this technology in terms of solitude is the where. If you have a guest in your office (like maybe you took your child to work), or you’re away travelling, or you just don’t want people to see your office (in my case, it would be because it’s a huge mess… :P), the hardware of the technology makes it difficult to relocate somewhere. There was a lot of talk about technology involving high-resolution streaming and big video monitors and improved ways to create the illusion of eye contact, but all of these make it, at least with current technology, difficult to impossible to reposition. This isn’t just a technological constraint either – to make a big display portable requires pursuing the right strategies, such as a projector rather than a screen, and creating the illusion of eye contact may require focus on eye-tracking technology, or devices that can provide multiple camera angles.