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Sensing is Believing: What People Think Biosensors Can Reveal About Thoughts and Feelings

Published: 18 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Biosensors-devices that sense the human body-are increasingly ubiquitous. However, it is unclear how people evaluate the risks associated with their use, in part because it is not well-understood what people believe these sensors can reveal. In this study, participants ranked biosensors by how likely they are to reveal what a person is thinking and feeling. We report quantitative and qualitative results of two survey-based studies, one on Mechanical Turk workers (n=100), and one on participants in a longitudinal self-tracking study (n=100). Our findings imply that, in the absence of information about particular sensing technologies, people rely on existing beliefs about the body to explain what they might reveal. Highlighting mismatches between perceived and actual technical capabilities, we contribute recommendations for designers and users.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DIS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference
    June 2019
    1628 pages
    ISBN:9781450358507
    DOI:10.1145/3322276
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International 4.0 License.

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    Published: 18 June 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. biosensing
    2. mind
    3. privacy

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    • William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

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    DIS '19: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2019
    June 23 - 28, 2019
    CA, San Diego, USA

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    DIS '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 415 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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