MCTs and universities: new risks, new visibilities and new vulnerabilities

Universities have long used new technologies to enhance teaching but mobile communication technologies (MCTs) are posing new ethical and policy challenges. The capture functions on MCTs bring considerable benefits in terms of a student being able to play back and review what was said in the teaching rooms. However, the convergence and connectivity of web 2.0 and its successors add new, as yet largely uncharted dimensions. It not only extends the classroom but also renders previously bounded teaching and residential spaces porous as anybody who has access to these rooms and a MCT can capture and open to outside scrutiny what previously would have been relatively private spaces. This has contradictory ethical implications. Abuses of power and indiscretions can be held to account before wider public opinion. However, the capture and dissemination of sensitive personal information in the form of the opinions, beliefs and ideas of students and staff can expose individuals to risk. Furthermore, the technologies also enable acceptable content to be edited and/or reformed into mashups that may not be intended to be malicious but have the potential for reputational damage. This paper explores these issues first in terms of a range of events and incidents that highlight new vulnerabilities and visibilities. It then outlines some of the policy responses in the United States in terms of cyberbullying; in the UK under data protection; and the implications of a proposed new EU directive. However, it argues, that the fundamental limitation with all of these is that ultimately the institution does not own the device and therefore its control of how it is used is limited. The paper concludes with some preliminary findings on how a handful of British universities are adopting a proactive response here

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given

Understanding Android Obfuscation Techniques: A Large-Scale Investigation in the Wild

In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches: identifier renaming, string encryption, Java reflection, and packing. To obtain the meaningful statistical results, we designed efficient and lightweight detection models for each obfuscation technique and applied them to our massive APK datasets (collected from Google Play, multiple third-party markets, and malware databases). We have learned several interesting facts from the result. For example, malware authors use string encryption more frequently, and more apps on third-party markets than Google Play are packed. We are also interested in the explanation of each finding. Therefore we carry out in-depth code analysis on some Android apps after sampling. We believe our study will help developers select the most suitable obfuscation approach, and in the meantime help researchers improve code analysis systems in the right direction

A qualitative study of stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment

Over two billion people are using the Internet at present, assisted by the mediating activities of software agents which deal with the diversity and complexity of information. There are, however, ethical issues due to the monitoring-and-surveillance, data mining and autonomous nature of software agents. Considering the context, this study aims to comprehend stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment in order to identify the main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services in the near future. Twenty-one stakeholders, belonging to three key stakeholder groups, were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy for unstandardised semi-structured e-mail interviews. The interview data were analysed using a qualitative content analysis method. It was possible to identify three main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services, which were classified into the following categories: comprehensive understanding of users' perception of privacy, user type recognition algorithms for software agent development and existing software agents enhancement