Normality mining: privacy implications of behavioral profiles drawn from GPS enabled mobile phones

There is growing interest in the ways in which the location of a person can be utilized by new applications and services. Recent advances in mobile technologies have meant that the technical capability to record and transmit location data for processing is appearing in off-the-shelf handsets. This opens possibilities to profile people based on the places they visit, people they associate with, or other aspects of their complex routines determined through persistent tracking. It is possible that services offering customized information based on the results of such behavioral profiling could become commonplace. However, it may not be immediately apparent to the user that a wealth of information about them, potentially unrelated to the service, can be revealed. Further issues occur if the user agreed, while subscribing to the service, for data to be passed to third parties where it may be used to their detriment. Here, we report in detail on a short case study tracking four people, in three European member states, persistently for six weeks using mobile handsets. The GPS locations of these people have been mined to reveal places of interest and to create simple profiles. The information drawn from the profiling activity ranges from intuitive through special cases to insightful. In this paper, these results and further extensions to the technology are considered in light of European legislation to assess the privacy implications of this emerging technology.

Emerging social norms in the UK and Japan on privacy and revelation in SNS

Semi-structured interviews with university students in the UK and Japan, undertaken in 2009 and 2010, are analysed with respect to the revealed attitudes to privacy, self-revelation and revelation by/of others on SNS.

Understanding consumer evaluations of personalised nutrition services in terms of the privacy calculus: a qualitative study

Background: Personalised nutrition (PN) may provide major health benefits to consumers. A potential barrier to the uptake of PN is consumers’ reluctance to disclose sensitive information upon which PN is based. This study adopts the privacy calculus to explore how PN service attributes contribute to consumers’ privacy risk and personalisation benefit perceptions. Methods: Sixteen focus groups (n = 124) were held in 8 EU countries and discussed 9 PN services that differed in terms of personal information, communication channel, service provider, advice justification, scope, frequency, and customer lock-in. Transcripts were content analysed. Results: The personal information that underpinned PN contributed to both privacy risk perception and personalisation benefit perception. Disclosing information face-to-face mitigated the perception of privacy risk and amplified the perception of personalisation benefit. PN provided by a qualified expert and justified by scientific evidence increased participants’ value perception. Enhancing convenience, offering regular face-to face support, and employing customer lock-in strategies were perceived as beneficial. Conclusion: This study suggests that to encourage consumer adoption, PN has to account for face-to-face communication, expert advice providers, support, a lifestyle-change focus, and customised offers. The results provide an initial insight into service attributes that influence consumer adoption of PN.

Search engine liability for autocomplete suggestions: personality, privacy and the power of the algorithm

This article is concerned with the liability of search engines for algorithmically produced search suggestions, such as through Google’s ‘autocomplete’ function. Liability in this context may arise when automatically generated associations have an offensive or defamatory meaning, or may even induce infringement of intellectual property rights. The increasing number of cases that have been brought before courts all over the world puts forward questions on the conflict of fundamental freedoms of speech and access to information on the one hand, and personality rights of individuals— under a broader right of informational self-determination—on the other. In the light of the recent judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in Google Spain v AEPD, this article concludes that many requests for removal of suggestions including private individuals’ information will be successful on the basis of EU data protection law, even absent prejudice to the person concerned.

An annotation-free method for evaluating privacy protection techniques in videos

While several privacy protection techniques are pre- sented in the literature, they are not complemented with an established objective evaluation method for their assess- ment and comparison. This paper proposes an annotation- free evaluation method that assesses the two key aspects of privacy protection that are privacy and utility. Unlike some existing methods, the proposed method does not rely on the use of subjective judgements and does not assume a spe- cific target type in the image data. The privacy aspect is quantified as an appearance similarity and the utility aspect is measured as a structural similarity between the original raw image data and the privacy-protected image data. We performed an extensive experimentation using six challeng- ing datasets (including two new ones) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the evaluation method by providing a per- formance comparison of four state-of-the-art privacy pro- tection techniques.

Students’ perception of privacy risks in using social networking sites for learning: a study of Uganda Christian University

Although social networking sites (SNSs) present a great deal of opportunities to support learning, the privacy risk is perceived by learners as a friction point that affects their full use for learning. Privacy risks in SNSs can be divided into risks that are posed by the SNS provider itself and risks that result from user’s social interactions. Using an online survey questionnaire, this study explored the students’ perception of the benefits in using social networking sites for learning purposes and their perceived privacy risks. A sample of 214 students from Uganda Christian University in Africa was studied. The results show that although 88 % of participants indicated the usefulness of SNSs for learning, they are also aware of the risks associated with these sites. Most of the participants are concerned with privacy risks such as identity theft, cyber bullying, and impersonation that might influence their online learning participation in SNSs.

Distributed access control and privacy for the internet of me

This article presents an experimental scalable message driven IoT and its security architecture based on Decentralized Information Flow Control. The system uses a gateway that exports SoA (REST) interfaces to the internet simplifying external applications whereas uses DIFC and asynchronous messaging within the home environment.

Librarians as Advocates for Social Media Privacy

Librarians must continue their traditional roles as privacy rights activists and intellectual freedom upholders into the digital age, and across electronic information sources, including social media fora. Social media is quickly becoming a major source of information and center for information seeking, and librarians have an opportunity to promote and help shape social media policies that protect users’ privacy and assure that users can seek information without inhibition. One way librarians can be involved in the promotion of online privacy is by joining the social media user rights movement and advocating terms of use agreements that protect information seekers that follow the "Privacy by Design" model created by Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D.

Social Media, Privacy, and the Academic Classroom

We live in a world full of social media and portable technology that allows for the effortless access to, and sharing of, information. While this constant connection can be viewed as a benefit by some, there have been recent, sometimes embarrassing, instances throughout the world that show just how quickly any expectation of privacy can be destroyed. From pictures of poorly dressed shoppers at a grocery store to customers recording interactions with their servers at restaurants, the internet is full of media (all with the potential to go viral) created and posted without consent of all parties captured. This risk to privacy is not just limited to retail and restaurants, as being in any situation amongst people puts you at risk, including being in an academic classroom. Anyone providing in-class instruction, be they professor or librarian, can be at risk for this type of violation of privacy. In addition, the students in the class are also at risk for being unwittingly captured by their classmates. To combat this, colleges and universities are providing recommendations to faculty regarding this issue, such as including suggested syllabus statements about classroom recording by students. In some instances, colleges and universities have instituted formal policies with strict penalties for violators. An overview of current privacy law as it relates to an academic setting is discussed as well as recent, newsworthy instances of student recording in the classroom and the resulting controversies. Additionally, there is a discussion highlighting various recommendations and formal policies that have been issued and adopted by colleges and universities around the country. Finally, advice is offered about what librarians can do to educate students, faculty, and staff about the privacy rights of others and the potential harm that could come from posting to social media and the open web images and video of others without their consent.

Privacy Advocacy in Libraries in the Age of Mass Surveillance

Alison Macrina is the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative that aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. The Library Freedom Project trains librarians on the state of global surveillance, privacy rights, and privacy-protecting technology, so that librarians may in turn teach their communities about safeguarding privacy. In 2015, Alison was named one of Library Journal‘s Movers and Shakers. Read more about the Library Freedom Project at libraryfreedomproject.org.

Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Lesson Plan

Each year search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, complete trillions of search queries online. Students are especially dependent on these search tools because of their popularity, convenience and accessibility. However, what students are unaware of, by choice or naiveté is the amount of personal information that is collected during each search session, how that data is used and who is interested in their online behavior profile. Privacy policies are frequently updated in favor of the search companies but are lengthy and often are perused briefly or ignored entirely with little thought about how personal web habits are being exploited for analytics and marketing. As an Information Literacy instructor, and a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I believe in the importance of educating college students and web users in general that they have a right to privacy online. Class discussions on the topic of web privacy have yielded an interesting perspective on internet search usage. Students are unaware of how their online behavior is recorded and have consistently expressed their hesitancy to use tools that disguise or delete their IP address because of the stigma that it may imply they have something to hide or are engaging in illegal activity. Additionally, students fear they will have to surrender the convenience of uber connectivity in their applications to maintain their privacy. The purpose of this lightning presentation is to provide educators with a lesson plan highlighting and simplifying the privacy terms for the three major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo. This presentation focuses on what data these search engines collect about users, how that data is used and alternative search solutions, like DuckDuckGo, for increased privacy. Students will directly benefit from this lesson because informed internet users can protect their data, feel safer online and become more effective web searchers.