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Is Anyone Looking? Mitigating Shoulder Surfing on Public Displays through Awareness and Protection

Published: 03 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Displays are growing in size, and are increasingly deployed in semi-public and public areas. When people use these public displays to pursue personal work, they expose their activities and sensitive data to passers-by. In most cases, such shoulder-surfing by others is likely voyeuristic vs. a deliberate attempt to steal information. Even so, safeguards are needed. Our goal is to mitigate shoulder-surfing problems in such settings. Our method leverages notions of territoriality and proxemics, where we sense and take action based on the spatial relationships between the passerby, the user of the display, and the display itself. First, we provide participants with awareness of shoulder-surfing moments, which in turn helps both parties regulate their behaviours and mediate further social interactions. Second, we provide methods that protect information when shoulder-surfing is detected. Here, users can move or hide information through easy to perform explicit actions. Alternately, the system itself can mask information from the passerby's view when it detects shoulder-surfing moments.

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  • (2025)Wormhole Whispers: Reflecting User Privacy Data Boundaries Through Algorithm VisualizationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1504203415:4(2034)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
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  1. Is Anyone Looking? Mitigating Shoulder Surfing on Public Displays through Awareness and Protection

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    PerDis '14: Proceedings of The International Symposium on Pervasive Displays
    June 2014
    217 pages
    ISBN:9781450329521
    DOI:10.1145/2611009
    • Editor:
    • Sven Gehring,
    • General Chair:
    • Sebastian Boring,
    • Program Chair:
    • Aaron Quigley
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 03 June 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. Public displays
    2. privacy
    3. proxemic interaction
    4. territoriality

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 213 of 384 submissions, 55%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)Wormhole Whispers: Reflecting User Privacy Data Boundaries Through Algorithm VisualizationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1504203415:4(2034)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
    • (2024)Exploring How UK Public Authorities Use Redaction to Protect Personal InformationACM Transactions on Management Information Systems10.1145/365198915:3(1-23)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Eliciting Multimodal and Collaborative Interactions for Data Exploration on Large Vertical DisplaysIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332315030:2(1624-1637)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Peering into the Algorithmic Cosmos: A Narrative Game for Demystifying Privacy Data CirculationHCI International 2024 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-76821-7_26(380-391)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Social Engineering Shoulder Surfing Attacks (SSAs): A Literature Review. Lessons, Challenges, and Future DirectionsAdvanced Research in Technologies, Information, Innovation and Sustainability10.1007/978-3-031-48855-9_17(220-233)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
    • (2023)The Friend’s Egg: A Prototype for Spatially Aware, Interpersonal, Audiovisual Remote Communication to Maintain Friendship over DistanceProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3626705.3631795(523-525)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2023
    • (2023)The Attendant Perspective: Present Others in Public Technology InteractionsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581231(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Privacy Protection Against Shoulder Surfing in Mobile EnvironmentsMobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services10.1007/978-3-031-34776-4_8(133-152)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
    • (2023)“They see me scrollin”—Lessons Learned from Investigating Shoulder Surfing Behavior and Attack Mitigation StrategiesHuman Factors in Privacy Research10.1007/978-3-031-28643-8_10(199-218)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2023
    • (2022)HeatGoggles: Enabling Ubiquitous Touch Input through Head-Mounted Devices using Thermal ImagingProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3568444.3570597(254-256)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2022
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