The Shoebox and the Safe: When Once-Personal Information Changes Hands
Venue
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Personal Information Management at CSCW 2012
Publication Year
2012
Authors
BibTeX
Abstract
This paper presents several examples where one user’s personal information is
accessed by another, without the consent of the owner, or without the capability of
the owner to consent to such sharing. While intentional sharing of information at
home as well as at work has been studied in detail, there is extremely limited
understanding about the practices, dimensions and models of unintentional sharing.
Laws and policies that were developed with paper and other nondigital archives in
mind are being found to be inadequate for addressing the challenges that digital
personal information brings. Worse, those laws are being enforced in inconsistent
ways, prompting lawsuits. Posthumously shared information brings up questions that
have not been addressed before. This paper starts by noting examples of posthumous
sharing and sharing without consent, proposes models and dimensions for
understanding it, and concludes by proposing research questions that need to be
addressed by the wider PIM community.
