Information Producers, Information Consumers : Location Data Privacy in Institutional Settings

Peer reviewedPreprin

Pass the Ball: Enforced Turn-Taking in Activity Tracking

We have developed a mobile application called Pass The Ball that enables users to track, reflect on, and discuss physical activity with others. We followed an iterative design process, trialling a first version of the app with 20 people and a second version with 31. The trials were conducted in the wild, on users' own devices. The second version of the app enforced a turn-taking system that meant only one member of a group of users could track their activity at any one time. This constrained tracking at the individual level, but more successfully led users to communicate and interact with each other. We discuss the second trial with reference to two concepts: social-relatedness and individual-competence. We discuss six key lessons from the trial, and identify two high-level design implications: attend to "practices" of tracking; and look within and beyond "collaboration" and "competition" in the design of activity trackers

Program analysis for android security and reliability

The recent, widespread growth and adoption of mobile devices have revolutionized the way users interact with technology. As mobile apps have become increasingly prevalent, concerns regarding their security and reliability have gained significant attention. The ever-expanding mobile app ecosystem presents unique challenges in ensuring the protection of user data and maintaining app robustness. This dissertation expands the field of program analysis with techniques and abstractions tailored explicitly to enhancing Android security and reliability. This research introduces approaches for addressing critical issues related to sensitive information leakage, device and user fingerprinting, mobile medical score calculators, as well as termination-induced data loss. Through a series of comprehensive studies and employing novel approaches that combine static and dynamic analysis, this work provides valuable insights and practical solutions to the aforementioned challenges. In summary, this dissertation makes the following contributions: (1) precise identifier leak tracking via a novel algebraic representation of leak signatures, (2) identifier processing graphs (IPGs), an abstraction for extracting and subverting user-based and device-based fingerprinting schemes, (3) interval-based verification of medical score calculator correctness, and (4) identifying potential data losses caused by app termination

Available approaches to heuristic evaluation of smart-phone applications

Abstract. Usability heuristics are a lightweight tool for finding usability problems in a piece of software. These heuristics can be used for any kind of software, from desktop applications to web sites to games and to smart-phone applications. With the rise of smart phones and applications developed for them there has been a need to update the approach of heuristic evaluation to consider the limitations and new possibilities brought by smart-phone applications, when compared to more traditional desk-top applications. In this bachelor’s thesis different these issues are discussed, and along this several lists of usability heuristics were identified and listed. In addition to listing out the current research on smart-phone application heuristics, these lists were compared against the issues that are specific to smart-phone applications. Research questions in this thesis are as follows: RQ1: What guidelines / usability heuristics can be found that specifically target mobile device user interfaces? RQ2: How do these heuristic lists consider the difficulties faced by smart-phone applications