Ubiquitous Social Networks: Opportunities and Challenges for Privacy-Aware User Modelling

Privacy has been recognized as an important topic in the Internet for a long time, and technological developments in the area of privacy tools are ongoing. However, their focus was mainly on the individual. With the proliferation of social network sites, it has become more evident that the problem of privacy is not bounded by the perimeters of individuals but also by the privacy needs of their social networks. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about privacy in social network sites, a topic which we consider to be severely under-researched. We propose a framework for analyzing privacy requirements and for analyzing privacy-related data. We outline a combination of requirements analysis, conflict-resolution techniques, and a P3P extension that can contribute to privacy within such sites.World Wide Web, privacy, social network analysis, requirements analysis, privacy negotiation, ubiquity, P3P

Position Paper: Escaping Academic Cloudification to Preserve Academic Freedom

Especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of cloud-based tools and solutions - lead by the ‘Zoomification’ of education, has picked up attention in the EdTech and privacy communities. In this paper, we take a look at the progressing use of cloud-based educational tools, often controlled by only a handful of major corporations. We analyse how this ‘cloudification’ impacts academics’ and students’ privacy and how it influences the handling of privacy by universities and higher education institutions. Furthermore, we take a critical perspective on how this cloudification may not only threaten users’ privacy, but ultimately may also compromise core values like academic freedom: the dependency relationships between universities and corporations could impact curricula, while also threatening what research can be conducted. Finally, we take a perspective on universities’ cloudification in different western regions to identify policy mechanisms and recommendations that can enable universities to preserve their academic independence, without compromising on digitalization and functionality

Can you engineer privacy?

status: publishe