TC: Small: Collaborative Research: Improved Privacy though Exposure Control

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

With the advent of sensor-rich mobile devices such as smartphones, an increasing number of people are sharing personal "contextual" information like location, activity, and health/fitness information with members of their social network. To enhance privacy for people sharing such information, a large body of research has focused on ways for users to specify who should be authorized to access their information. This research improves end-user privacy by addressing the related question of "Who is accessing my information and to what extent?". Providing users with an accurate sense of their "exposure" will enable them to better control how their contextual information is shared and will help mitigate emerging privacy risks. This research advances the state of the art in privacy by formalizing the notion of exposure-awareness research, and by investigating metrics that can be used to quantify a person?s exposure, developing usable feedback models and visualizations that leverage these metrics to convey exposure, and creating exposure control extensions to established policy architectures to help users control exposure and refine their data sharing policies over time. The proposed research will thus allow ordinary people to proactively rein in the amount of personal information shared online, and will reduce the privacy risks for the large population of users who are increasingly using social-networking applications to share personal contextual information.