Privacy interfaces for information management

To facilitate the sharing of information using modern communication networks, users must be able to decide on a privacy policy---what information to conceal, what to reveal, and to whom. We describe the evolution of privacy interfaces---the user interfaces for specifying privacy policies ---in COLLABCLIO, a system for sharing web browsing histories. Our experience has shown us that privacy policies ought to be treated as first-class objects: policy objects should have an intensional representation, and privacy interfaces should support direct manipulation of these objects. We also show how these conclusions apply to a variety of domains such as file systems, email, and telephony. Keywords Privacy, user interfaces, direct manipulation, WWW, information retrieval, intensional/extensional set representations. INTRODUCTION It is commonplace that modern communication networks should support the sharing of information while protecting peoples privacy. To this end networks provide mech...