[7 Sep 2010 | No Comment | ]
New Scientist features PRiMMA research

OU PhD student, Lukasz Jedrzejczyk’s research on usable privacy controls features in a recent New Scientist article. Lukasz’s work is part of the EPSRC funded project on Privacy Rights Management for Mobile Applications (PRiMMA), being carried out in the Department of Computing at the OU. Motivated by the rising use of mobile applications, the project explores the user requirements, usability issues and technology solutions relating to supporting end user privacy when using these applications.
The work reported in the New Scientist relates to a trial of a haptic user interface that allows users …

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[6 Sep 2010 | No Comment | ]
ContraVisions: Exploring future technologies

We conducted a study based on filming two futuristic scenarios, getting a group of potential users to watch and discuss the films.  The two scenarios were carefully crafted to present opposing experiences of the same technology.  For the purposes of producing the films for this study we imagined a future technology called DietMon, which allows a user to obtain calorific information about food that they might like to consume by simply looking at the food for 3 seconds.  This imagined technology also included a embedded micro-sensor that monitored physical activity and physiological factors …

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[23 Jun 2010 | No Comment | ]
Collaborative Privacy Policy Authoring

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the popularity of social networking services. These online services enable users to construct groups of contacts, referred to as friends, with which they can share digital content and communicate. This sharing is actively encouraged by the social networking services, with users’ privacy often seen as a secondary concern. In this paper we first propose a privacy-aware social networking service and then introduce a collaborative approach to authoring privacy policies for the service. In addressing user privacy, our approach takes into account the needs of all parties affected by the disclosure of information …

Publications »

[19 Mar 2010 | No Comment | ]

The online presence projected by a person is comprised of all the information about them available on the Internet. In online communities and social networking services, it is often possible for third-parties to modify this content by, for example, commenting on existing content or uploading new content. This has the potential to negatively impact the privacy of a presence owner (the person referred to by the on-line content) by disclosing information about them without consent. In this paper we propose a Privacy Butler, an automated service that can monitor a …

Publications »

[7 Apr 2009 | Comments Off | ]

Mobile privacy concerns are central to Ubicomp and yet remain poorly understood. We advocate a diversified approach, enabling the cross-interpretation of data from complementary methods. However, mobility imposes a number of limitations on the methods that can be effectively employed. We discuss how we addressed this problem in an empirical study of mobile social networking.