Reconciling mobile app privacy and usability on smartphones

As they compete for developers, mobile app ecosystems have been exposing a growing number of APIs through their software development kits. Many of these APIs involve accessing sensitive functionality and/or user data and require approval by users. Android for instance allows developers to select from over 130 possible permissions. Expecting users to review and possibly adjust settings related to these permissions has proven unrealistic. In this paper, we report on the results of a study analyzing people’s privacy preferences when it comes to granting permissions to different mobile apps. Our results suggest that, while people’s mobile app privacy preferences are diverse, a relatively small number of profiles can be identified that offer the promise of significantly simplifying the decisions mobile users have to make. Specifically, our results are based on the analysis of settings of 4.8 million smartphone users of a mobile security and privacy platform. The platform relies on a rooted version of Android where users are allowed to choose between “granting”, “denying ” or “requesting to be dynamically prompted ” when it comes to granting 12 different Android permissions to mobile apps they have downloaded. 1

Management and Enhancement of Livable Urban Streetscape through the Development of the 3D Spatial Multimedia System

Maintaining the continuity of a valuable and livable visual experience is very important for the quality of urban streetscape planning and design. One of the impacts of the rapid development of urban streetscape is unsatisfying pedestrian space for spatial and visual comfort. In line with establishing good governance, it is necessary to evaluate the quality of urban visuals by involving community participation through online participation. The case study on the five provincial streets In Malang, Indonesia, has become a strategic route for the uncontrolled rapid growth of commercial districts alongside these streetscapes. This study promoted spatial multimedia development as a decision support system in the planning process as one of the recent developments in design planning activity by developing a multimedia 3D spatial system based on public preferences in the local community. A combination of three sequential stages was conducted, starting with investigating public preferences that produced spatial and visual comfort assessment through the Semantic Differential method and regression model analysis, followed by the 3D streetscape modeling ends with the development of a Spatial Multimedia System. This study resulted in several findings. The investigation of public preferences determined dominant variables and significant variables that affect the streetscape\u27s spatial and visual comfort aspects. This outcome guided the development scenario of 3D modeling construction and 3D simulation of each streetscape and the development of a decision-making system in the 3D spatial multimedia system. This finding also revealed the significance of the leveling strategy of user interactive advancement in the system

Improving availability awareness with relationship filtering

Awareness servers provide information about a person to help observers determine whether a person is available for contact. A trade -off exists in these systems: more sources of information, and higher fidelity in those sources, can improve people’s decisions, but each increase in information reduces privacy. In this thesis, we look at whether the type of relationship between the observer and the person being observed can be used to manage this trade-off. We conducted a survey that asked people what amount of information from different sources that they would disclose to seven different relationship types. We found that in more than half of the cases, people would give different amounts of information to different relationships. We then constructed a prototype system and conducted a Wizard of Oz experiment where we took the system into the real world and observed individuals using it. Our results suggest that awareness servers can be improved by allowing finer-grained control than what is currently available

Infrastructure for human-centered computing in distributed, pervasive, intelligent environments

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-165).As intelligent environments (IEs) move from simple kiosks and meeting rooms into the everyday offices, kitchens, and living spaces we use, the need for these spaces to communicate not only with users, but also with each other, will become increasingly important. Users will want to be able to shift their work environment between localities easily, and will also need to communicate with others as they move about. These IEs will thus require two pieces of infrastructure: a knowledge representation (KR) which can keep track of people and their relationships to the world; and a communication mechanism so that the IE can mediate interactions. This thesis seeks to define, explore and evaluate one way of creating this infrastructure, by creating societies of agents that can act on behalf of real-world entities such as users, physical spaces, or informal groups of people. Just as users interact with each other and with objects in their physical location, the agent societies interact with each other along communication channels organized along these same relationships. By organizing the infrastructure through analogies to the real world, we hope to achieve a simpler conceptual model for the users, as well as a communication hierarchy which can be realized efficiently.by Stephen L. Peters.Ph.D

Hierarchical categorisation of tags for delicious

In the scenario of social bookmarking, a user browsing the Web bookmarks web pages and assigns free-text labels (i.e., tags) to them according to their personal preferences. In this technical report, we approach one of the practical aspects when it comes to represent users' interests from their tagging activity, namely the categorization of tags into high-level categories of interest. The reason is that the representation of user profiles on the basis of the myriad of tags available on the Web is certainly unfeasible from various practical perspectives; mainly concerning the unavailability of data to reliably, accurately measure interests across such fine-grained categorisation, and, should the data be available, its overwhelming computational intractability. Motivated by this, our study presents the results of a categorization process whereby a collection of tags posted at Delicious #http://delicious.com# are classified into 200 subcategories of interest.Preprin