Privacy

Problem description

Ubiquitous technology enables people to access and share personal information in various places and situations with aid of heterogeneous devices. Encryption and device and application level security models are important in supporting privacy, but privacy management however is at least as important and difficult problem. Instead of information theory driven approaches we see that privacy management schemes must tie in with the way people understand and already manage their private information.

Ubicomp environments involving e.g. sensor information and social collaboration or interaction pose new types of privacy challenges. People involved in ad hoc activities may act in ways that compromise their long term privacy strategies. For example, there may be peer pressure to provide information for to serve (seemingly) one-time purposes. However, due to the complexity of such systems, it is difficult to anticipate what the privacy issues at stake are.

In ubicomp systems privacy needs to be built in right from the start: The privacy design needs to take into account the protocols, devices, user interfaces, and the complete application/service layout. Often privacy can be taken into account in non-intrusive ways, so that people instead of configuring "privacy settings" privacy would be taken into account in the normal flow of the system usage.

Research questions

1) Ubicomp systems are part of everyday life and their privacy approach must fit existing privacy practices.

• How do people manage private information in their current lives?

2) We construct novel ubicomp applications that are test-beds for ubiquitous interaction.

• How to design and implement privacy features to be non-intrusive part of applications and services?

3) The use of the systems may require the user to give private information.

• How to make the users aware of the privacy implications of their actions?

4) The test applications are evaluated in the field to find out how they are used in real-life settings.

• Do the test systems communicate the privacy implications to the users succesfully?
• What opinions people actually have about the privacy issues?

Projects

The track is advanced in IPCity and ContextCues-projects.

Publications

Oulasvirta, A. and Sumari, L. (to appear). Mobile kits and laptop trays: Managing multiple devices in mobile information work. Proceedings of CHI 2007.