Improved Privacy Preserving Profile Matching in Online Social Networks

Social networking  became popular because of its digital  communication technologies  tools  for  extending  the  social  circle  of  people.  Privacy preservation became a significant  issue  in  social  networking. This work discussed user profile matching  with  privacy preservation and introduced a group of   profile  matching  protocols. Online social network with a mixture of public and private user profiles to predict the private attributes of users. We map this problem to a relational classification problem and we propose practical models that use friendship and group membership information (which is often not hidden) to infer sensitive attributes. The key novel idea is that in addition to friendship links, groups can be carriers of significant information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses operation-based and group-based classification to study privacy implications in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles

Transport mapping : emotional cartography, mobility and the body politics of place

This paper outlines an approach to researching transport mobilities through the visualisation of social data by mapping of movement and experiences in place. Drawing on Creswell’s (2006; 2010) framework for a “politics of mobility”, Sheller and Urry’s notion of the “new mobilities paradigm” (2006), and Harding and Pribram’s (2002) approach to historicizing emotions through their contextualization, digital mapping is used to draw out social and emotional aspects of transport mobility in a local place context. This reworking of geographic spaces highlights social motivations and individual experiences as influences within a broader understanding about the generation of a range of movement for transport mobility studies. Following from Nold’s (2009) work in emotional cartography, and Del Casino and Hanna’s (2006) theory of “map spaces”, the paper describes a pilot research case study titled the “Transport Mapping” project where a mapping event is used to capture a range of place details and emotional responses linked to a specific place context. The project is a conducted at a university community based in Western Sydney, a fast growing urban region with sprawling urban infrastructures. As a result of the mapping process, a unique geographic space is rendered and represented with reference to a range of human subjectivities and body politics. Opportunities for dialogues between researchers and respondents at such an event are shown as an important catalyst for capturing emotional and social mapping data. Creswell’s (2006; 2010) work on the centrality of transport mobility and the need to further investigate the space it occupies is succinctly expressed in his six points for a “politics of mobility” (2010). These points provide a useful framework for evaluating the emotional mapping responses from this pilot study towards a body politics of place, as an affective geography. As a result of this evaluation, some additional points are proposed to add to Creswell’s mobility framework. These highlight the immediacy of personal experience and emotional responses to local contexts of transport mobility for research into alternative and affective body politics of place

Reputation and Reward : Two Sides of the Same Bitcoin

In Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), the power of the crowd, jointly with the sensing capabilities of the smartphones they wear, provides a new paradigm for data sensing. Scenarios involving user behavior or those that rely on user mobility are examples where standard sensor networks may not be suitable, and MCS provides an interesting solution. However, including human participation in sensing tasks presents numerous and unique research challenges. In this paper, we analyze three of the most important: user participation, data sensing quality and user anonymity. We tackle the three as a whole, since all of them are strongly correlated. As a result, we present PaySense, a general framework that incentivizes user participation and provides a mechanism to validate the quality of collected data based on the users' reputation. All such features are performed in a privacy-preserving way by using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Rather than a theoretical one, our framework has been implemented, and it is ready to be deployed and complement any existint MCS system

Designing participation in agile ridesharing with mobile social software

Growing participation is a key challenge for the viability of sustainability initiatives, many of which require enactment at a local community level in order to be effective. This paper undertakes a review of technology assisted carpooling in order to understand the challenge of designing participation and consider how mobile social software and interface design can be brought to bear. It was found that while persuasive technology and social networking approaches have roles to play, critical factors in the design of carpooling are convenience, ease of use and fit with contingent circumstances, all of which\ud require a use-centred approach to designing a technological system and building participation. Moreover, the reach of technology platform-based global approaches may be limited if they do not cater to local needs. An approach that focuses on iteratively designing technology to support and grow mobile social ridesharing networks in particular locales is proposed. The paper contributes an understanding of HCI approaches in the context of other designing participation approaches

Utilisation des technologies persuasives dans le domaine du transport : bonnes et mauvaises pratiques Web pour favoriser le covoiturage

RÉSUMÉ : Le covoiturage présente plusieurs avantages pour ses participants et pour la société. Cela dit, il reste à ce jour un mode de transport relativement marginal comparativement au transport solo en véhicule, et ce, malgré l’avènement des technologies de l’information qui ont permis que de nouvelles initiatives de covoiturage soient facilitées par des sites web. Les concepteurs de ce type de site font face à un défi majeur de conception afin d’augmenter le taux de participation aux initiatives de covoiturage. Heureusement, de nouvelles connaissances ont récemment commencé à se développer afin de comprendre comment les systèmes technologiques peuvent aider à influencer les comportements et les attitudes de leurs utilisateurs. Notre recherche explore les possibilités des technologies persuasives dans le domaine du covoiturage. Les objectifs visés sont doubles. Le premier objectif vise à identifier les pratiques de conception persuasives utilisées dans quatre sites web à succès de support au covoiturage à l’aide d’un outil d’évaluation du caractère persuasif d’un système, soit la grille de persuasion technologique de Nemery et Brangier (2012). Ces pratiques sont ensuite regroupées dans un recueil pouvant être utilisé comme outil d’aide à la conception pour la création de sites web de support au covoiturage. Le second objectif est d’analyser la valeur ajoutée de l’utilisation de la grille de persuasion technologique pour des concepteurs appliquant déjà un processus de conception centré utilisateur utilisant les notions généralement connues de l’ergonomie. L’utilisation de la grille de persuasion technologique pour évaluer quatre sites web à succès de support au covoiturage a permis d’identifier 155 pratiques de conception persuasives pouvant être utilisées comme aide à la conception. Plus précisément, 139 bonnes pratiques et 16 mauvaises pratiques ont été identifiées. L’analyse de la valeur ajoutée réalisée par deux spécialistes en ergonomie des interfaces humain-ordinateur sur l’ensemble des pratiques de ce recueil a révélé que 81,3% des pratiques de conception trouvées grâce à la grille auraient également pu être obtenues lors de la conception des sites en suivant un processus de conception centré utilisateur et en appliquant les notions généralement connues de l’ergonomie. Malgré ce pourcentage, la valeur ajoutée par l’utilisation de la grille nous semble très positive; cinq sous-critères de la grille apportent une valeur ajoutée considérable pour les concepteurs. Nous avons formulé quelques critiques et fait des recommandations pour améliorer l’utilisation de la grille de persuasion technologique lors de l’évaluation des interfaces humain-ordinateur.----------ABSTRACT : Carpooling offers many benefits to carpoolers and society. Yet, to this day it remains a relatively marginal mode of transportation compared to solo driving despite new carpooling initiatives on different websites. Designers of these websites are facing the major challenge of increasing the participation rate to carpooling initiatives. Fortunately, new knowledge has recently been developed to understand how technological systems can help to influence user’ behaviors and attitudes. Our research investigates the possibilities offered by persuasive technologies applied to carpooling. Its objectives are twofold. The first is to identify persuasive design practices used in four popular carpooling websites with the help of an evaluation tool of the persuasive nature of a system : the technological persuasion grid of Nemery and Brangier (2012). These practices are then grouped into a collection that can be used as a design tool to create carpooling websites. The second objective is to analyse the added value of using the technological persuasion grid when designers are already following a user-centered design process and using commonly known ergonomic concepts. We used the technological persuasion grid to evaluate four popular carpooling websites and could identify 155 persuasive design practices: 139 good and 16 bad ones. The added value of using the grid has revealed that on average 81.3% of the practices found with the technological persuasion grid would have been found during the design of the websites by following a user-centered design process and by applying commonly known ergonomic concepts. In our opinion, the added value of using the grid is really positive. In fact, five sub-criteria of the grid have a considerable added value for designers. We made comments and recommendations to improve the use of the technological persuasion grid so that it can serve as an user interface evaluation tool

Security and Privacy Preservation in Mobile Social Networks

Social networking extending the social circle of people has already become an important integral part of our daily lives. As reported by ComScore, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have reached 82 percent of the world's online population, representing 1.2 billion users around the world. In the meantime, fueled by the dramatic advancements of smartphones and the ubiquitous connections of Bluetooth/WiFi/3G/LTE networks, social networking further becomes available for mobile users and keeps them posted on the up-to-date worldwide news and messages from their friends and families anytime anywhere. The convergence of social networking, advanced smartphones, and stable network infrastructures brings us a pervasive and omnipotent communication platform, named mobile social network (MSN), helping us stay connected better than ever. In the MSN, multiple communication techniques help users to launch a variety of applications in multiple communication domains including single-user domain, two-user domain, user-chain domain, and user-star domain. Within different communication domains, promising mobile applications are fostered. For example, nearby friend search application can be launched in the two-user or user-chain domains to help a user find other physically-close peers who have similar interests and preferences; local service providers disseminate advertising information to nearby users in the user-star domain; and health monitoring enables users to check the physiological signals in the single-user domain. Despite the tremendous benefits brought by the MSN, it still faces many technique challenges among of which security and privacy protections are the most important ones as smartphones are vulnerable to security attacks, users easily neglect their privacy preservation, and mutual trust relationships are difficult to be established in the MSN. In this thesis, we explore the unique characteristics and study typical research issues of the MSN. We conduct our research with a focus on security and privacy preservation while considering human factors. Specifically, we consider the profile matching application in the two-user domain, the cooperative data forwarding in the user-chain domain, the trustworthy service evaluation application in the user-star domain, and the healthcare monitoring application in the single-user domain. The main contributions are, i) considering the human comparison behavior and privacy requirements, we first propose a novel family of comparison-based privacy-preserving profile matching (PPM) protocols. The proposed protocols enable two users to obtain comparison results of attribute values in their profiles, while the attribute values are not disclosed. Taking user anonymity requirement as an evaluation metric, we analyze the anonymity protection of the proposed protocols. From the analysis, we found that the more comparison results are disclosed, the less anonymity protection is achieved by the protocol. Further, we explore the pseudonym strategy and an anonymity enhancing technique where users could be self-aware of the anonymity risk level and take appropriate actions when needed; ii) considering the inherent MSN nature --- opportunistic networking, we propose a cooperative privacy-preserving data forwarding (PDF) protocol to help users forward data to other users. We indicate that privacy and effective data forwarding are two conflicting goals: the cooperative data forwarding could be severely interrupted or even disabled when the privacy preservation of users is applied, because without sharing personal information users become unrecognizable to each other and the social interactions are no longer traceable. We explore the morality model of users from classic social theory, and use game-theoretic approach to obtain the optimal data forwarding strategy. Through simulation results, we show that the proposed cooperative data strategy can achieve both the privacy preservation and the forwarding efficiency; iii) to establish the trust relationship in a distributed MSN is a challenging task. We propose a trustworthy service evaluation (TSE) system, to help users exchange their service reviews toward local vendors. However, vendors and users could be the potential attackers aiming to disrupt the TSE system. We then consider the review attacks, i.e., vendors rejecting and modifying the authentic reviews of users, and the Sybil attacks, i.e., users abusing their pseudonyms to generate fake reviews. To prevent these attacks, we explore the token technique, the aggregate signature, and the secret sharing techniques. Simulation results show the security and the effectiveness of the TSE system can be guaranteed; iv) to improve the efficiency and reliability of communications in the single-user domain, we propose a prediction-based secure and reliable routing framework (PSR). It can be integrated with any specific routing protocol to improve the latter's reliability and prevent data injection attacks during data communication. We show that the regularity of body gesture can be learned and applied by body sensors such that the route with the highest predicted link quality can always be chose for data forwarding. The security analysis and simulation results show that the PSR significantly increases routing efficiency and reliability with or without the data injection attacks