Pro-Social Deception

Pro-Social Deception

The pervasiveness of smart devices and sensing, whilst bringing potential benefits, also poses considerable threats to personal autonomy. In the Pro-Social Deception project, we explore future personal sensing tools that give people "space to deceive", and that even facilitate or automate deception to give people the ability to regain their autonomy.

In an empirical investigation, we asked people to reflect on several sketches of fictional tools (called the 'lieCloud' or 'liePhone' suite) that used automated deception to help individuals preserve their privacy. Our results show that many people are open to many pro-social uses of such tools, which raise design considerations for the future of privacy-preserving social machines.