Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Smart Home or Smart Hell?: Modeling Smart Home IoT-Facilitated Abuse as a Cybersecurity Threat

Smart homes are just one application of IoT or the “Internet of Things.” As a solution to create a more automated “smart home” experience, users have the ability to control the temperature, or turn off their lights with a single command. However, smart home technology is vulnerable to unique cybersecurity and privacy issues due to the personal nature of user-device interactions. In addition, the multi-user environments in which IoT has been implemented has considerable social nuances which play a factor in interpersonal cybersecurity threats. Smart Home-IoT Facilitated Abuse (SH-IoTFA) is an alarming phenomenon of users weaponizing smart home technology as a tool to perpetrate “Intimate Partner Violence” (IPV) using the built-in, convenient features. Despite the emergence of research on SH-IoTFA, there is a need to implement greater consideration for potentially abusive affordances in the development process through an attacker-centric threat model framework. This thesis explores how Sh-IoTFA has emerged and evolved from traditional Technology- Facilitated Abuse (TFA) and demonstrates, through a thematic review of the current literature, how attacker motivations influence their relationship with a device, and in turn, transform seemingly innocuous convenience features into tools for surveillance, power exertion, and harassment. Furthermore, this thesis breaks down the relational aspect between the attacker’s motivations, the device features, and the assets at risk for a victim. Utilizing the threat scenario, the Google Nest Hub was then analyzed to identify how an abuse perpetrator may potentially misuse the device. Overall, through an integration of interdisciplinary perspectives, this research highlighted interpersonal threats as a cybersecurity concern and proposed a threat model that may reduce inadvertent harm to consumers

Toward a process theory of entrepreneurship: revisiting opportunity identification and entrepreneurial actions

This dissertation studies the early development of new ventures and small business and the entrepreneurship process from initial ideas to viable ventures. I unpack the micro-foundations of entrepreneurial actions and new ventures’ investor communications through quality signals to finance their growth path. This dissertation includes two qualitative papers and one quantitative study. The qualitative papers employ an inductive multiple-case approach and include seven medical equipment manufacturers (new ventures) in a nascent market context (the mobile health industry) across six U.S. states and a secondary data analysis to understand the emergence of opportunities and the early development of new ventures. The quantitative research chapter includes 770 IPOs in the manufacturing industries in the U.S. and investigates the legitimation strategies of young ventures to gain resources from targeted resource-holders.Open Acces

Big Brother is Listening to You: Digital Eavesdropping in the Advertising Industry

In the Digital Age, information is more accessible than ever. Unfortunately, that accessibility has come at the expense of privacy. Now, more and more personal information is in the hands of corporations and governments, for uses not known to the average consumer. Although these entities have long been able to keep tabs on individuals, with the advent of virtual assistants and “always-listening” technologies, the ease by which a third party may extract information from a consumer has only increased. The stark reality is that lawmakers have left the American public behind. While other countries have enacted consumer privacy protections, the United States has no satisfactory legal framework in place to curb data collection by greedy businesses or to regulate how those companies may use and protect consumer data. This Article contemplates one use of that data: digital advertising. Inspired by stories of suspiciously well-targeted advertisements appearing on social media websites, this Article additionally questions whether companies have been honest about their collection of audio data. To address the potential harms consumers may suffer as a result of this deficient privacy protection, this Article proposes a framework wherein companies must acquire users\u27 consent and the government must ensure that businesses do not use consumer information for harmful purposes

A First Look Into Users’ Perceptions of Facial Recognition in the Physical World

Facial recognition (FR) technology is being adopted in both private and public spheres for a wide range of reasons, from ensuring physical safety to providing personalized shopping experiences. It is not clear yet, though, how users perceive this emerging technology in terms of usefulness, risks, and comfort. We begin to address these questions in this paper. In particular, we conducted a vignette-based study with 314 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk to investigate their perceptions of facial recognition in the physical world, based on thirty-five scenarios across eight different contexts of FR use. We found that users do not have a binary answer towards FR adoption. Rather, their perceptions are grounded in the specific contexts in which FR will be applied. The participants considered a broad range of factors, including control over facial data, the utility of FR, the trustworthiness of organizations using FR, and the location and surroundings of FR use to place the corresponding privacy risks in context. They weighed the privacy risks with the usability, security, and economic gain of FR use as they reported their perceptions. Participants also noted the reasons and rationals behind their perceptions of facial recognition, which let us conduct an in-depth analysis of their perceived benefits, concerns, and comfort with using this technology in various scenarios. Through this first systematic look into users’ perceptions of facial recognition in the physical world, we shed light on the tension between FR adoption and users’ concerns. Taken together, our findings have broad implications that advance the Privacy and Security community’s understanding of FR through the lens of users, where we presented guidelines for future research in these directions

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section