Virtual Private Milieus : sharing our digital aura through social and physical proximity

Abstract

People are quite good at establishing a social style and using it in different communications contexts, but they do less well when the communication is mediated by computer networks. It is hard to control what information is revealed and how one's digital persona will be presented or interpreted. In this thesis, we ameliorate this problem by creating a "Virtual Private Milieu", a "VPM", that allows networked devices to act on our behalf and project a "digital aura" to other people and devices around us in a manner analogous to the way humans naturally interact with one another. The dynamic aggregation of the different auras and facets that the devices expose to one another creates social spheres of interaction between sets of active devices, and consequently between people. We focus on the subset of networking that deals with proximate communication, which we dub Face-to-Face Networking (FtFN). Network interaction in this space is often analogous to human face-to-face interaction, and increasingly, our devices are being used in local situations. We describe a VPM framework, key features of which include the incorporation of trust and context parameters into the discovery and communication process, incorporation of multiple contextunique identities, and also the support for multiple degrees of security and privacy. We also present the "Social Dashboard", a readily usable control for one's aura. Finally, we review "Comm.unity", a software package that allows developers and researchers easy implementation and deployment of local and distant social applications, and present two applications developed over this platform.