Serious invasions of privacy in the digital era: final report

This report provides the legal design of a tort to deal with serious invasions of privacy in the digital era, and makes sixteen other recommendations that would strengthen people’s privacy in the digital environment. Executive summary Context of the inquiry A cause of action for serious invasion of privacy does not presently exist in Australian law. A person’s privacy may be invaded in a range of ways. Such invasions may occur with increasing ease and frequency in the digital era, when the mobile phones in our pockets are all potential surveillance devices, drones are becoming cheaper and more advanced, and personal information once put online seems impossible to destroy or forget. This Inquiry considers how Australian law may be reformed to prevent and remedy serious invasions of privacy. However, it occurs in the context of other concerns about privacy, such as those raised by ‘big data’ and surveillance by governments and others. Indeed, it seems that privacy is rarely out of the news

You never dance alone:Supervising autoethnography

I have been asked to write a chapter for this book on the dilemmas and consequences of publishing autoethnography (AE). I can hear the paper, waiting in the wings, warming up for a fretful performance, with privacy violations, public shame, and academic skepticism playing lead roles - but I don’t want that show to go on. The skeptics haven’t really hurt my career; the shame would exist with or without AE, and the violations would too; they’d just be in fieldwork sites that are further away and easier to forget. As Melissa Orlie (1997) argues, trespass is inevitable. Of course, there are degrees, and it ought to be minimized, but so far as I know, nothing terrible has happened or been prevented by my writing. There have been no dire consequences. I don’t know if this says something about AE or about me: High-risk activities (like driving) can stop feeling dangerous if you do them every day. Despite my vanity and the generosity of the readers who sometimes write to thank me for my work, I am not convinced that it matters or does much for anyone but me

Why Do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Password Managers?

People use weak passwords for a variety of reasons, the most prescient of these being memory load and inconvenience. The motivation to choose weak passwords is even more compelling on Smartphones because entering complex passwords is particularly time consuming and arduous on small devices. Many of the memory- and inconvenience-related issues can be ameliorated by using a password manager app. Such an app can generate, remember and automatically supply passwords to websites and other apps on the phone. Given this potential, it is unfortunate that these applications have not enjoyed widespread adoption. We carried out a study to find out why this was so, to investigate factors that impeded or encouraged password manager adoption. We found that a number of factors mediated during all three phases of adoption: searching, deciding and trialling. The study’s findings will help us to market these tools more effectively in order to encourage future adoption of password managers

Forget-me-not: History-less Mobile Messaging

Text messaging has long been a popular activity, and today smartphone apps enable users to choose from a plethora of mobile messaging applications. While we know a lot about SMS practices, we know less about practices of messaging applications. In this paper, we take a first step to explore one ubiquitous aspect of mobile messaging – messaging history. We designed, built, and trialled a mobile messaging application without history—named forget-me-not. The two-week trial showed that history-less messaging no longer supports chit-chat as seen in e.g. WhatsApp, but is still considered conversational and more ‘engaging’. Participants expressed being lenient and relaxed about what they wrote. Removing the history allowed us to gain insights into what uses history has in other mobile messaging applications, such as planning events, allowing for distractions, and maintaining multiple conversation threads

Reliable online social network data collection

Large quantities of information are shared through online social networks, making them attractive sources of data for social network research. When studying the usage of online social networks, these data may not describe properly users’ behaviours. For instance, the data collected often include content shared by the users only, or content accessible to the researchers, hence obfuscating a large amount of data that would help understanding users’ behaviours and privacy concerns. Moreover, the data collection methods employed in experiments may also have an effect on data reliability when participants self-report inacurrate information or are observed while using a simulated application. Understanding the effects of these collection methods on data reliability is paramount for the study of social networks; for understanding user behaviour; for designing socially-aware applications and services; and for mining data collected from such social networks and applications. This chapter reviews previous research which has looked at social network data collection and user behaviour in these networks. We highlight shortcomings in the methods used in these studies, and introduce our own methodology and user study based on the Experience Sampling Method; we claim our methodology leads to the collection of more reliable data by capturing both those data which are shared and not shared. We conclude with suggestions for collecting and mining data from online social networks.Postprin

Privacy and Power

Something has gone wrong in modem America, argues Jeffrey Rosen in The Unwanted Gaze. Our medical records are bought and sold by health care providers, drug companies, and the insurance industry. Our e-mails are intercepted and read by our employers. Amazon.com knows everything there is to know about our reading and web-browsing habits. Poor Monica Lewinsky\u27s draft love letters to President Bill Clinton were seized by the villainous Ken Starr, and ultimately plastered all over the nation\u27s newspapers. To Rosen, the nature of the problem is clear: These examples are all part of a troubling phenomenon that affects all Americans: namely, the erosion of privacy at home, at work, and in cyberspace, so that intimate personal information ... is increasingly vulnerable to being wrenched out of context and exposed to the world. Rosen is, of course, hardly unusual in viewing all these issues as quintessential privacy violations. In the past few years the media seem to have woken up to privacy issues, and most of us have been sympathetic readers of dozens of popular articles addressing just such a range of privacy violations. At the moment, the language of privacy seems to be the only language we have for talking about issues such as workplace e-mail monitoring, electronic cookies, medical records, and Monica\u27s love letters. Is this a good thing? Unquestionably, Rosen\u27s examples are troubling, but are they all troubling in precisely the same way? Does it make sense to analyze them all as solely or primarily examples of the erosion of privacy ? Moreover, is there a coherent and articulate conception of privacy that underlies all of Rosen\u27s examples