Usability and privacy: a study of Kazaa P2P file-sharing

@inproceedings{Good2003UsabilityAP,
  title={Usability and privacy: a study of Kazaa P2P file-sharing},
  author={Nathaniel Good and Aaron Krekelberg},
  booktitle={CHI '03},
  year={2003}
}
P2P file sharing systems such as Gnutella, Freenet, and KaZaA, while primarily intended for sharing multimedia files, frequently allow other types of information to be shared. This raises serious concerns about the extent to which users may unknowingly be sharing private or personal information.In this paper, we report on a cognitive walkthrough and a laboratory user study of the KaZaA file sharing user interface. The majority of the users in our study were unable to tell what files they were… 
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230 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
12
Background Citations
93
Methods Citations
22
Results Citations
3

230 Citations

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TLDR
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Imagine that two users, Alice and Bob, have a conversation about a sensitive subject over email, and someone on the peer-to-peer network peruses Bob's shared space, finds his email files, and reads their private conversation.
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