Towards location privacy awareness on geo-social networks

With the current trend of embedding location services within social networks, an ever growing amount of users' spatiotemporal tracks are being collected and used to generate user profiles. Issues of personal privacy and especially those stemming from tracking user location become more important to address. In this work, it is argued that support of location privacy awareness within social networks is needed to maintain the users' trust in their services. Current practices of pre-configuring location disclosure settings have been shown to be limited, where users' sense of location privacy dynamically change with context. In this paper, location privacy awareness is considered within a composite view of place, time and social data recorded in user profiles. The paper examines the possible threats to personal privacy from exposure of this data and the design of feedback tools to allow users to control their privacy. A user study is used to examine the impact of the feedback provided on users' perception of privacy and the link between their privacy concerns and their attitude towards using the geo-social network. Findings confirm the strong need for more transparent access to and control over user location profiles, and guide the proposal of recommendations to the design of more privacy-sensitive geo-social networks

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work