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Users make hundreds of transactional permission decisions for smartphone applications, but these decisions persist beyond the context in which they were made. We hypothesized that user concern over permissions varies by context, e.g., that users might be more concerned about location permissions at home than work. To test our hypothesis, we ran a 44-participant, 4-week experience sampling study, asking users about their concern over specific application-permission pairs, plus their physical environment and context. We found distinguishable differences in participants’ concern about permissions across locations and activities, suggesting that users might benefit from more dynamic and contextually-aware approaches to permission decision-making. However, attempts to assist users in configuring these more complex permissions should be made with the aim to reduce concern and affective discomfort—not to normalize and perpetuate this discomfort by replicating prior decisions alone. 

For the last seven years, PlanetScope satellites have started near-daily imaging of parts of the Earth’s surface, making high-density multitemporal, multispectral, 3-m pixel imagery accessible to researchers. Multitemporal satellite data enables landscape archaeologists to examine changes in environmental conditions at time scales ranging from daily to decadal. This kind of temporal resolution can accentuate landscape features on the ground by de-emphasizing non-permanent signatures caused by seasonal or even daily changes in vegetation. We argue that the availability of high spatial and temporal resolution multispectral imagery from Planet Inc. will enable new approaches to studying archaeological visibility in landscapes. While palimpsests are discrete overlapping layers of material accumulation, multitemporal composites capture cyclical and seasonal time and can be used to interpret past landscape histories at multiple scales. To illustrate this perspective, we present three case studies using PlanetScope imagery in tropical environments on the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Zanzibar.