Analyzing users’ behaviour to identify their privacy concerns

The majority of studies examining privacy concerns of Internet users are based on surveys. Many problems have, however, been identified with using surveys to measure people’s privacy concerns. Based on our experience from our previous studies, in this paper we discuss how ethnographic interviews and observation techniques could be used to analyze users’ behaviour in terms of how they share personal information and multimedia content with others, and utilize this to identify issues related to their privacy concerns more comprehensively than it is otherwise possible with conventional surveys

Technical Privacy Metrics: a Systematic Survey

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed versionThe goal of privacy metrics is to measure the degree of privacy enjoyed by users in a system and the amount of protection offered by privacy-enhancing technologies. In this way, privacy metrics contribute to improving user privacy in the digital world. The diversity and complexity of privacy metrics in the literature makes an informed choice of metrics challenging. As a result, instead of using existing metrics, new metrics are proposed frequently, and privacy studies are often incomparable. In this survey we alleviate these problems by structuring the landscape of privacy metrics. To this end, we explain and discuss a selection of over eighty privacy metrics and introduce categorizations based on the aspect of privacy they measure, their required inputs, and the type of data that needs protection. In addition, we present a method on how to choose privacy metrics based on nine questions that help identify the right privacy metrics for a given scenario, and highlight topics where additional work on privacy metrics is needed. Our survey spans multiple privacy domains and can be understood as a general framework for privacy measurement

An empirical analysis of SNS users and their privacy and security awareness of risks associated with sharing SNS profiles (online identities)

Social networking sites (SNS) like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn now have hundreds of millions of users. In this paper a quantitative approach was used to analyse primary data collected about SNS users. Our findings show that SNS users are dominated by younger adults, higher education levels and higher income levels. SNSs are more likely to be used for maintaining existing friendships as opposed to establishing new friendships and for building business networks. SNS users either have poor levels of privacy and security awareness or high levels of complacency in relation to SNS profile sharing and sharing their identity online

Self-Imposed Violations of Privacy in Virtual Communities

Virtual communities have grown in recent years due to the accessibility and ease of setting up web pages on communal Internet sites. Organizations, including companies that seek to hire new employees, often scan these web sites as part of their background checking process. One of the most prominent sites is MySpace.com. This research investigates issues of privacy and self-violation of privacy in virtual communities. The results indicate that individuals willingly provide personal information that may actually violate their privacy.Virtual communities; privacy; violations of privacy; MySpace; Information Systems; online social networks.

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Performance and Security Improvements for Tor: A Survey

Tor [Dingledine et al. 2004] is the most widely used anonymity network today, serving millions of users on a daily basis using a growing number of volunteer-run routers. Since its deployment in 2003, there have been more than three dozen proposals that aim to improve its performance, security, and unobservability. Given the significance of this research area, our goal is to provide the reader with the state of current research directions and challenges in anonymous communication systems, focusing on the Tor network.We shed light on the design weaknesses and challenges facing the network and point out unresolved issues

The state of peer-to-peer network simulators

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results

An Analysis of Social Networking Sites: Privacy Policy and Features

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are at the heart of many people lives, and the majority of both students and adults who use them to share information, keeping contact with old friends and meeting new acquaintances. However, the increasing number of action on online services also gives a raised to privacy concerns and issues. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is investigate the two SNSs i.e. Facebook and Friendster in terms of privacy policy and features, users‟ preferences and needs as well as producing a guideline for good SNSs from users design perspective. In an attempt to achieve the objectives of this study, however, two different approaches were employed; first literature has reviewed for two SNSs for the comparative analysis, and secondly quantitative approach technique was used. Online questionnaire was designed and published on the web and the respondents were able to access and sent back respectively. The survey was limited only to one hundred respondents within the Universiti Utara Malaysia. Findings from this study reveal that there are significant differences and similarities between Facebook and Friendster privacy policy and features. However, Friendster has hidden users‟ identity information by default to only friends, while Facebook has made it public to everyone. Results from survey in this study indicate that most of the respondents disclose information including personal and private information with public and friends, nevertheless, many respondents prefer to share their personal and private information with friends. Although, majority of respondents are aware of privacy setting changes, while they have notable attitude toward privacy protection as well as trust. This study usher a new era towards knowledge of social networking sites and the result can be use to the body of literature on information system with emphasis on privacy policy setting and features