Evaluating Potentials of Internet- and Web-based Socialtv in the Light of Privacy

In the current information technology age, the demand of tools that meet social interaction needs, e.g. SocialTV and Internet-based media advertisement, is gaining in importance. Thus privacy becomes a matter of concern in this respect. Social interactions comprises privacy risks and threats that may enable abuse, e.g., man-in-the-middle attacks based on profile analysis at the server-side. Since in the area of SocialTV current software as well as hardware solutions are mostly server-centric, one cannot fully eliminate accidental or intentional risks and threats even by the reconstruction of users´ personal information and their interdependencies. In this paper, we report on results of an evaluation of the potentials of SocialTV by considering end-users´ privacy based on lab and field trials. In these trials we enabled eighteen people of various ages and expertise to use centralized as well as decentralized (group-centric) solutions for SocialTV by means of a Web-based software prototype. Further, we describe the followed methodology used by the evaluation in order to allow porting it for future evaluations in other social contexts.