Surveillance or Support?: When Personalization Turns Creepy

Personalization, recommendations, and user modeling can be powerful tools to improve people's experiences with technology and to help them find information. However, we also know that people underestimate how much of their personal information is used by our technology and they generally do not understand how much algorithms can discover about them. Both privacy and ethical technology have issues of consent at their heart. While many personalization systems assume most users would consent to the way they employ personal data, research shows this is not necessarily the case. This talk will look at how to consider issues of privacy and consent when users cannot explicitly state their preferences, The Creepy Factor, and how to balance users' concerns with the benefits personalized technology can offer.