Monday, May 19, 2014

Do-Not-Record-Me: Quantified Self and the Privacy Challenge

We are increasingly surrounded by recording and quantifying devices. Devices such as Google Glass can record images and sound from an individual, even of the owner of the device has no such intensions. Can we use a Privacy-Beacon to avoid this? something like, a local area broadcast, that forces, or at least politely asks the intruding device, to either not record an individual, or remove their data after recording has been done? In a short note, myself and Ian Brown think this is possible! here's a short note on this topic:

The increasing availability of personal activity monitors, tracking devices, wearable recording devices, and associated smartphone apps has given rise to a wave of Quantified Self individuals and applications. The data from these apps and sensors are usually collected by associated apps and uploaded to the software developers for feedback to individual and their selected partners. In this paper we highlight the privacy risks associated with this practice, demonstrating the ease with which an app provider can infer individuals co-location and joint activities without having access to specific location data. We highlight a number of potential solution to this challenge in order to minimise the privacy leakage from these applications.

http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~hamed/papers/qselfprivacy2014.pdf