It has been almost two years after the world was shocked
with the surveillance scandal made by the NSA agency, where according to The Guardian ( http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/24/brazil-president-un-speech-nsa-surveillance ), “Personal data of citizens was
intercepted indiscriminately”. Certainty, this scandal led to a global
awareness of how valuable our personal information is and how badly it can be
misused.
Unfortunately, there are very few studies and tools that focus into
providing alternatives for keeping our private data safe, while still not
completely disrupting with the current targeted ad campaigns or giving breach
for terrorism threats.
Our online interactions seem to be increasing exponentially
in the past few years. With more devices and services being used every day, it
is really hard to be aware how much data we generate every day and an even
harder to know how our data is being used by others.
Considering this constraints, we propose an Android mobile
app that enables people to engage with the collection and management of their
own personal data. The platform can be referred as a Databox, and will be
situated on the users own smart phone with all the gathered data available
there. The main reason why all the data will be persisted just on the user own
device is because there are a range of privacy threats that arise due to, for
example, storing all this data about us in a third party website or cloud
service.
The data gathered and stored in the Databox is the
following:
Online Profile: Facebook
profile information, as name, gender, locale, email and age.
· Individual: Personal
location history using the device GPS system.
· Online social Network Sentiment
analysis: A sentiment analysis over the user own posts on Twitter.
· Online social Network Trend
analysis: A daily trend analysis over the posts made by the user and
their connections in Twitter and Instagram.
· Health: Total
number of steps made by the user in each day.
The current objective of the Databox is to generate user
awareness and control over its own online generated data. But we foresee a
wider spectrum that this application could fit in. We plan to provide the users
of the app with the ability to choose certain pieces of data to be made
available to third parties as a form of payment for a service or simply appreciation.
This could allow many different types of interaction, as the Databox being a
new type of currency available for us to use.
The targeted
ad campaigns models by the analysis of personal data could also be benefited by
the use of Databox, in a much less invasive way. Media companies and end users
could agree upon which and how each data piece would be used.
Always allowing each of us to be in total control of our online generated data
and deciding who should have access to it.
To download the app, please go to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=project.course.qmul.databox.
The Databox project is open source and currently available
at https://github.com/DataboxInc/DataboxQMULAndroidApp,
all contributions are greatly appreciated.
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