PD Notify: Investigating Personal Content on Public Displays

Public displays are becoming more and more ubiquitous. Current public displays are mainly used as general information displays or to display advertisements. How personal content should be shown is still an important research topic. In this paper, we present PD Notify, a system that mirrors a user's pending smartphone notifications on nearby public displays. Notifications are an essential part of current smartphones and inform users about various events, such as new messages, pending updates, personalized news, and upcoming appointments. PD Notify implements privacy settings to control what is shown on the public displays. We conducted an in-situ study in a semi-public work environment for three weeks with seven participants. The results of this first deployment show that displaying personal content on public displays is not only feasible but also valued by users. Participants quickly settled for privacy settings that work for all kinds of content. While they liked the system, they did not want to spend time configuring it.