Challenges in the delivery of e-government through kiosks

Kiosks are increasingly being heralded as a technology through which governments, government departments and local authorities or municipalities can engage with citizens. In particular, they have attractions in their potential to bridge the digital divide. There is some evidence to suggest that the citizen uptake of kiosks and indeed other channels for e-government, such as web sites, is slow, although studies on the use of kiosks for health information provision offer some interesting perspectives on user behaviour with kiosk technology. This article argues that the delivery of e-government through kiosks presents a number of strategic challenges, which will need to be negotiated over the next few years in order that kiosk applications are successful in enhancing accessibility to and engagement with e-government. The article suggests that this involves consideration of: the applications to be delivered through a kiosk; one stop shop service and knowledge architectures; mechanisms for citizen identification; and, the integration of kiosks within the total interface between public bodies and their communities. The article concludes by outlining development and research agendas in each of these areas.</p

FlexPass: Symbiosis of Seamless User Authentication Schemes in IoT

This paper presents a new user authentication paradigm which is based on a flexible user authentication method, namely FlexPass. FlexPass relies on a single, user-selected secret that can be reflected in both textual and graphical authentication secrets. Such an approach facilitates adaptability in nowadays ubiquitous user interaction contexts within the Internet of Things (IoT), in which end-users authenticate multiple times per day through a variety of interaction device types. We present an initial evaluation of the new authentication method based on an in-lab experiment with 32 participants. Analysis of results reveal that the FlexPass paradigm is memorable and that users like the adaptable perspective of the new approach. Findings are expected to scaffold the design of more user-centric knowledge-based authentication mechanisms within nowadays ubiquitous computation realms

Investigating similarity between privacy policies of social networking sites as a precursor for standardization

The current execution of privacy policies, as a mode of communicating information to users, is unsatisfactory. Social networking sites (SNS) exemplify this issue, attracting growing concerns regarding their use of personal data and its effect on user privacy. This demonstrates the need for more informative policies. However, SNS lack the incentives required to improve policies, which is exacerbated by the difficulties of creating a policy that is both concise and compliant. Standardization addresses many of these issues, providing benefits for users and SNS, although it is only possible if policies share attributes which can be standardized. This investigation used thematic analysis and cross- document structure theory, to assess the similarity of attributes between the privacy policies (as available in August 2014), of the six most frequently visited SNS globally. Using the Jaccard similarity coefficient, two types of attribute were measured; the clauses used by SNS and the coverage of forty recommendations made by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. Analysis showed that whilst similarity in the clauses used was low, similarity in the recommendations covered was high, indicating that SNS use different clauses, but to convey similar information. The analysis also showed that low similarity in the clauses was largely due to differences in semantics, elaboration and functionality between SNS. Therefore, this paper proposes that the policies of SNS already share attributes, indicating the feasibility of standardization and five recommendations are made to begin facilitating this, based on the findings of the investigation

Black artists in the United States

International audienceIn all user-centred agent-based applications, for instance in the context of ambient computing, the user agent is often faced to a difficult trade-off between the protection of its own privacy, and the fluidity offered by the services. In existing applications, the choice is almost never on the user's side, even though the law grants him a number of rights in order to guarantee his privacy. We examine here different technical works that seem to be as many interesting ways of dealing with privacy policies. The problems already solved will be identified, as well as remaining technical challenges. Then we will propose directions of research based on the most interesting aspects of the underlined approaches

Usable privacy for mobile sensing applications

Current mobile applications gather an increasing amount of data about the users and their environment. To protect their privacy, users can currently either opt out of using the applications or switch off their mobile phones. Such binary choices, however, void potential benefit for both users and applications. As an alternative, finer control over their privacy could be given to users by deploying privacy-preserving mechanisms. However, it is unclear if users are able to perform the necessary configuration of such schemes. In this paper, we therefore investigate to which degree users can understand the underlying mechanisms as well as the resulting trade-offs in terms of, e.g., privacy protection and battery consumption. To this end, we have conducted a user study involving 20 participants based on user interfaces especially designed for this purpose. The results show that our participants would prefer deciding on the consequences and leave the system parameterizing the underlying mechanism