After Over-Privileged Permissions: Using Technology and Design to Create Legal Compliance

Consumers in the mobile ecosystem can putatively protect their privacy with the use of application permissions. However, this requires the mobile device owners to understand permissions and their privacy implications. Yet, few consumers appreciate the nature of permissions within the mobile ecosystem, often failing to appreciate the privacy permissions that are altered when updating an app. Even more concerning is the lack of understanding of the wide use of third-party libraries, most which are installed with automatic permissions, that is permissions that must be granted to allow the application to function appropriately. Unsurprisingly, many of these third-party permissions violate consumers’ privacy expectations and thereby, become “over-privileged” to the user. Consequently, an obscurity of privacy expectations between what is practiced by the private sector and what is deemed appropriate by the public sector is exhibited. Despite the growing attention given to privacy in the mobile ecosystem, legal literature has largely ignored the implications of mobile permissions. This article seeks to address this omission by analyzing the impacts of mobile permissions and the privacy harms experienced by consumers of mobile applications. The authors call for the review of industry self-regulation and the overreliance upon simple notice and consent. Instead, the authors set out a plan for greater attention to be paid to socio-technical solutions, focusing on better privacy protections and technology embedded within the automatic permission-based application ecosystem

Going Rogue: Mobile Research Applications and the Right to Privacy

This Article investigates whether nonsectoral state laws may serve as a viable source of privacy and security standards for mobile health research participants and other health data subjects until new federal laws are created or enforced. In particular, this Article (1) catalogues and analyzes the nonsectoral data privacy, security, and breach notification statutes of all fifty states and the District of Columbia; (2) applies these statutes to mobile-app-mediated health research conducted by independent scientists, citizen scientists, and patient researchers; and (3) proposes substantive amendments to state law that could help protect the privacy and security of all health data subjects, including mobile-app-mediated health research participants

The Impacts of Privacy Rules on Users' Perception on Internet of Things (IoT) Applications: Focusing on Smart Home Security Service

Department of Management EngineeringAs communication and information technologies advance, the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the way people live. In particular, as smart home security services have been widely commercialized, it is necessary to examine consumer perception. However, there is little research that explains the general perception of IoT and smart home services. This article will utilize communication privacy management theory and privacy calculus theory to investigate how options to protect privacy affect how users perceive benefits and costs and how those perceptions affect individuals??? intentions to use of smart home service. Scenario-based experiments were conducted, and perceived benefits and costs were treated as formative second-order constructs. The results of PLS analysis in the study showed that smart home options to protect privacy decreased perceived benefits and increased perceived costs. In addition, the perceived benefits and perceived costs significantly affected the intention to use smart home security services. This research contributes to the field of IoT and smart home research and gives practitioners notable guidelines.ope

European Law and Regulation of Mobile Net Neutrality

Mobile is a rapidly growing and potentially major element of the future Internet, and its environment cannot be sensibly considered in isolation from fixed networks [2]. A note on terminology: Europe uses the term Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) while the United States uses 'wireless' Internet Service Providers (ISPs) [3]. 'Wireless' is somewhat more open in the United States. In Europe, mobile has always made special pleading for forms of self-regulation, as we will see. The article introduces mobile broadband, then considers net neutrality in the fixed environment including the new laws passed in November 2009 in the European Parliament, before considering the mobile net neutrality debate, the degree of price control regulation exerted on European mobiles and the MNOs' vigorous rear-guard anti-regulation defence. Finally, I look at the effects of this regulatory asymmetry and whether MNO calls for mobile to be treated differently from other ISPs can be justified. I conclude by examining what the effect of price and content control on mobile is likely to be for incentives for fixed ISPs and produce a result that I describe as the 'fixed' strategy

Trust and Privacy Permissions for an Ambient World

Ambient intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will trust such systems and at the same time achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. This chapter describes recent research related to privacy and trust with regard to ambient technology. The method used in the study is described and findings discussed

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Evaluating the Contextual Integrity of Privacy Regulation: Parents' IoT Toy Privacy Norms Versus COPPA

Increased concern about data privacy has prompted new and updated data protection regulations worldwide. However, there has been no rigorous way to test whether the practices mandated by these regulations actually align with the privacy norms of affected populations. Here, we demonstrate that surveys based on the theory of contextual integrity provide a quantifiable and scalable method for measuring the conformity of specific regulatory provisions to privacy norms. We apply this method to the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), surveying 195 parents and providing the first data that COPPA's mandates generally align with parents' privacy expectations for Internet-connected "smart" children's toys. Nevertheless, variations in the acceptability of data collection across specific smart toys, information types, parent ages, and other conditions emphasize the importance of detailed contextual factors to privacy norms, which may not be adequately captured by COPPA.Comment: 18 pages, 1 table, 4 figures, 2 appendice