Telecommunications Network Design: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

The network design to support a digital data service (DDS) is a major design issue for telecommunications organizations. Typically, the DDS network consists of three components - hubs, end-offices, and customer locations. The hubs are the primary nodes that form the backbone infrastructure. The customers are connected by leased lines to the local end-office and the end- offices are in turn connected to the hubs. Typically, the customers are always connected to one end-office and each end-office is connected to one hub or node, thereby creating a star topology in the local access network. There are costs involved in setting up and operating the hub, the links connecting the hubs, links from the end-office to hub, and links from the customer to the end- office. The network designer is primarily interested in designing a network infrastructure that meets the customers’requirements at minimum cost

RFID Privacy Concerns: A Conceptual Analysis in the Healthcare Sector

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a wireless technology that utilizes radio waves to automatically capture data for identifying and tracking objects and/or people. As the use of RFID has grown, so has the chorus of privacy invasions against this identity-aware technology. With the planned deployment and use of RFID in healthcare, there are concerns regarding the social, technological and regulatory complexity of the RFID technology vis-à-vis the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In this paper we use the principles of Fair Information Practice (FIP) as a guideline to examine the design of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). The outcome shows that PETs fail to incorporate the FIP principles and the importance of examining the social aspect of this ubiquitous technology from a sociotechnical perspective. The socio-technical perspective, with its emphasis on the examination of complex relations among social and technical interactions of RFID, can provide a useful insight to assess the societal impact and changes to individual behavior that may arise from privacy concerns. We believe that, using the groundwork laid down in this study, future research along these directions could contribute significantly to addressing privacy concerns expressed about RFID in the context of healthcare

Healthcare Information Privacy Research: Iusses, Gaps and What Next?

The proliferation of e-health holds great promises in sharing medical data, improving healthcare quality, saving patient lives and reducing costs. However, these potential benefits also bring much attention to the issues of information privacy. Given that medical data disclosure is the second highest reported breaches, it is imperative to understand both information privacy and its context in healthcare. Just as lack of appropriate privacy measures might cause economic harm or denied service from insurance or employers, tight privacy can prevent care providers from accessing patient information in time to save lives. This paper takes an integrated look into the area of healthcare information privacy from both MIS and health informatics perspectives. Based on the literature review and our personal communication with health informatics experts, we identified and presented four major themes: 1) scope and definition of privacy and electronic health records, 2) the information privacy issues and threats, 3) the countermeasures used to address and manage information privacy and 4) why privacy responses matter. This paper provides a unique perspective to privacy in the context of healthcare by focusing on the issues, the matching countermeasures and the drivers behind organizational behaviors into how they manage these threats

Information Disclosure and Online Social Networks: From the Case of Facebook News Feed Controversy to a Theoretical Understanding

Based on the insights learned from the case analysis of the Facebook News Feed outcry, we develop a theoretical understanding that identifies major drivers and impediments of information disclosure in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Research propositions are derived to highlight the roles of privacy behavioral responses, privacy concerns, perceived information control, trust in OSN providers, trust in social ties, and organizational privacy interventions. The synthesis of privacy literature, bounded rationality and trust theories provides a rich understanding of the adoption of OSNs that creates privacy and security vulnerabilities, and therefore, informs the privacy research in the context of OSNs. The findings are also potentially useful to privacy advocates, regulatory bodies, OSN providers, and marketers to help shape or justify their decisions concerning OSNs

Tamper detection in RFID-enabled supply chains using fragile watermarking

While mainstream RFID research has been focused on solving privacy issues, security in general and data tampering in specific is still an open question. This paper analyzes potential security threats especially data tampering in RFID-enabled supply chains and proposes solutions how these threats might be addressed using fragile watermarking technologies. We first survey RFID system and its security problems, and then explain the importance of fragile watermarking schemes for RFID systems and possible applications using fragile watermarking to detect and locate any modification in RFID systems. Finally we suggest possible solutions using fragile watermarking for RFID-enabled supply chain