Dynamic Privacy Adaptation in Ubiquitous Computing

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Florian Schaub

DATE: Monday, March 11th, 2013
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room A22, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 14.30

ABSTRACT:
Ubiquitous computing is characterized by the integration of computing aspects into the physical environment. Physical and virtual worlds start to merge as physical artifacts gain digital sensing, processing, and communication capabilities. This development introduces a number of privacy challenges. Physical boundaries lose their meaning in terms of privacy demarcation. Furthermore, the tight integration with the physical world necessitates the consideration not only of observation and information privacy aspects but also disturbances of the user's physical environment. Due to the resulting complexity of systems, users have difficulties to estimate potential privacy implications of their actions and decisions.

From a user's perspective, privacy can be viewed as a dynamic regulation process. In this talk, we present a corresponding model and detail how respective privacy mechanisms can be developed that support users in making informed privacy decisions. We outline a dynamic privacy adaptation process for ubiquitous computing that leverages the user's context and individually learned privacy preferences to either provide individualized privacy recommendations to the user or automatically adapt privacy controls accordingly. A privacy context model is described that captures privacy-relevant context features and facilitates the detection of privacy-relevant context changes in the user's physical and virtual environment. The talk further discusses the design of a privacy decision engine based on case-based reasoning which facilitates the application of previously learned preferences to new situations and adapts to the individual users over time.

The practicality of the outlined approach for dynamic privacy adaptation is discussed in the context of specific use cases from the domains of ambient assisted living, computer-supported collaborative work, and location-based services.

BIO:
Florian Schaub is a researcher at the Institute of Media Informatics at Ulm University in Germany, where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science. His research is focused on user-centric and context-adaptive privacy mechanisms for ubiquitous and mobile computing. Further research interests are HCI, usable security, mobile security, and vehicular ad-hoc communication. He holds a Diplom in Computer Science from Ulm University and a Bachelor in Information Technology (Multimedia Technology) from Deakin University, Australia.

HOST: Prof. Marc Langheinrich