Who Would You Share Your Information With?

Microsoft Research has put out a new technical report on consumer information sharing preferences. The study is based on an hour-and-a-half long survey that was given to 30 people “who worked in small-to-medium sized companies for whom sharing might be useful.”

The report takes their answers and clusters into several groups.

This paper is based on a shorter paper that was presented today at the CHI2005 conference.

The key finding: Although people vary in their overall level of comfort in sharing, we discovered key classes of recipients and information. Such abstractions highlight the promise of developing simpler, more expressive controls for sharing and privacy.

The paper is online at: ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004-138.pdf