Accountabilities of Presence: Reframing Location-Based Systems

Emily I. Troshynski, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Charlotte Lee, University of California, Irvine
Paul Dourish, University of California, Irvine

Abstract

How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people's everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions of "privacy." We introduce the notion of accountabilities of presence and suggest that it is a more useful concept than "privacy" for understanding the relationship between presence and sociality.