On the Measurement of Privacy as an Attacker's Estimation Error

A wide variety of privacy metrics have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the level of protection offered by privacy enhancing-technologies. Most of these metrics are specific to concrete systems and adversarial models, and are difficult to generalize or translate to other contexts. Furthermore, a better understanding of the relationships between the different privacy metrics is needed to enable more grounded and systematic approach to measuring privacy, as well as to assist systems designers in selecting the most appropriate metric for a given application. In this work we propose a theoretical framework for privacy-preserving systems, endowed with a general definition of privacy in terms of the estimation error incurred by an attacker who aims to disclose the private information that the system is designed to conceal. We show that our framework permits interpreting and comparing a number of well-known metrics under a common perspective. The arguments behind these interpretations are based on fundamental results related to the theories of information, probability and Bayes decision.Comment: This paper has 18 pages and 17 figure

A Survey on Routing in Anonymous Communication Protocols

The Internet has undergone dramatic changes in the past 15 years, and now forms a global communication platform that billions of users rely on for their daily activities. While this transformation has brought tremendous benefits to society, it has also created new threats to online privacy, ranging from profiling of users for monetizing personal information to nearly omnipotent governmental surveillance. As a result, public interest in systems for anonymous communication has drastically increased. Several such systems have been proposed in the literature, each of which offers anonymity guarantees in different scenarios and under different assumptions, reflecting the plurality of approaches for how messages can be anonymously routed to their destination. Understanding this space of competing approaches with their different guarantees and assumptions is vital for users to understand the consequences of different design options. In this work, we survey previous research on designing, developing, and deploying systems for anonymous communication. To this end, we provide a taxonomy for clustering all prevalently considered approaches (including Mixnets, DC-nets, onion routing, and DHT-based protocols) with respect to their unique routing characteristics, deployability, and performance. This, in particular, encompasses the topological structure of the underlying network; the routing information that has to be made available to the initiator of the conversation; the underlying communication model; and performance-related indicators such as latency and communication layer. Our taxonomy and comparative assessment provide important insights about the differences between the existing classes of anonymous communication protocols, and it also helps to clarify the relationship between the routing characteristics of these protocols, and their performance and scalability

Exploring Personal Information Disclosure and Protective Behaviour of Research Scholars’ when Seeking Information from the Web.

The collection of personal information became the most prominent threat associated with information consumption from the web. Existing research has not explored the information disclosure and protective behaviour of PhD research scholars. This investigation aimed to address the following objectives: (1) To find the Information-Seeking Behaviours of research scholars (2) To explore the research scholars’ attitudes towards personal information disclosure (3) To explore the protective behaviours of research scholars’ towards personal information disclosure. The study aims to contribute to existing knowledge in information disclosure behaviour and protective behaviour. The empirical research consists of thirty (30) PhD research scholars from the Department of Library and Information Science; Economics and Commerce of North-Eastern Hill University. These scholars’ were selected using a convenient sampling technique to get a prompt response. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyse the data. The results showed that research scholar’s information need on research topic accounted to (60%) daily and used the Internet daily. The findings showed that most research scholars’ do not trust the website and consider their personal information as unsafe on the web. Most of them reported having refused to give their personal identifiable information while considerable percentages are unfamiliar with the privacy emerging technologies (Example: Tor browser, Remove malware/Spyware, cookies, anonymous browsing, etc.). This study provides guidelines for the research scholars’ to protect their personal information, thus, preventing scholars from privacy risks. The study contributes new knowledge concerning privacy concerns thus, broadened the context of personal disclosure in the online scenario

Supporting the Design of Privacy-Aware Business Processes via Privacy Process Patterns

Privacy is an increasingly important concern for modern software systems which handle personal and sensitive user information. Privacy by design has been established in order to highlight the path to be followed during a system’s design phase ensuring the appropriate level of privacy for the information it handles. Nonetheless, transitioning between privacy concerns identified early during the system’s design phase, and privacy implementing technologies to satisfy such concerns at the later development stages, remains a challenge. In order to overcome this issue, mainly caused by the lack of privacy-related expertise of software systems engineers, this work proposes a series of privacy process patterns. The proposed patterns encapsulate expert knowledge and provide predefined solutions for the satisfaction of different types of privacy concerns. The patterns presented in this work are used as a component of an existing privacy-aware system design methodology, through which they are applied to a real life system

Australian Digital Commerce: A commentary on the retail sector

In this market study we analysed the digital presences of 89 Australian retailers using a catalogue of 63 single items. We find that while Australian retailers have achieved reasonable levels of maturity in the informational and transactional dimensions, and also ventured into the social media space, they are lacking in implementing the relational components of digital commerce. Termed the 'relational gap', this finding points to missed opportunities in building loyalty and lasting relationships with their customers as the basis for repeat purchases and cross selling

A comparative forensic analysis of privacy enhanced web browsers

Growing concerns regarding Internet privacy has led to the development of enhanced privacy web browsers. The intent of these web browsers is to provide better privacy for users who share a computer by not storing information about what websites are being visited as well as protecting user data from websites that employ tracking tools such as Google for advertisement purposes. As with most tools, users have found an alternative purpose for enhanced privacy browsers, some illegal in nature. This research conducted a digital forensic examination of three enhanced privacy web browsers and three commonly used web browsers in private browsing mode to identify if these browsers produced residual browsers artifacts and if so, if those artifacts provided content about the browsing session. The examination process, designed to simulate common practice of law enforcement digital forensic investigations, found that when comparing browser type by browser and tool combination, out of a possible 60 artifacts, the common web browsers produced 26 artifacts while the enhanced privacy browsers produced 25 for a difference of 2\%. The tool set used also had an impact in this study, with FTK finding a total of 28 artifacts while Autopsy found 23, for a difference of 8\%. The conclusion of this research found that although there was a difference in the number of artifacts produced by the two groups of browsers, the difference was not significant to support the claim that one group of browsers produced fewer browsers than the other. As this study has implications for privacy minded citizens as well as law enforcement and digital forensic practitioners concerned with browser forensics, this study identified a need for future research with respect to internet browser privacy, including expanding this research to include more browsers and tools

Institutional Layering: A Review of the Use of the Concept

Over the years layering has gained increasing attention in studies of institutional change. Notably, the concept has been subject to the exact mechanism it tries to explain: incremental change. This article reviews the use of the concept over a 60-year time span in order to elucidate its value for studying institutional change. The article especially looks at the use of the concept by one of the leading authors in the field: Kathleen Thelen. It concludes that layering provides a bridge between - seemingly conflicting - ideas on incremental change and punctuated equilibrium

What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen

Social navigation

In this chapter we present one of the pioneer approaches in supporting users in navigating the complex information spaces, social navigation support. Social navigation support is inspired by natural tendencies of individuals to follow traces of each other in exploring the world, especially when dealing with uncertainties. In this chapter, we cover details on various approaches in implementing social navigation support in the information space as we also connect the concept to supporting theories. The first part of this chapter reviews related theories and introduces the design space of social navigation support through a series of example applications. The second part of the chapter discusses the common challenges in design and implementation of social navigation support, demonstrates how these challenges have been addressed, and reviews more recent direction of social navigation support. Furthermore, as social navigation support has been an inspirational approach to various other social information access approaches we discuss how social navigation support can be integrated with those approaches. We conclude with a review of evaluation methods for social navigation support and remarks about its current state