Keerthi Thomas

From spaces to places: emerging contexts in mobile privacy

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. We report on how, by combining a variation of experience sampling and contextual interviews, we have started focusing on a notion of context in relation to privacy, which is subjectively defined by emerging socio-cultural knowledge, functions, relations and rules. With reference to Gieryns sociological work, we call this place, as opposed to a notion of context that is objectively defined by physical and factual elements, which we call space. We propose that the former better describes the context for mobile privacy.

Distilling privacy requirements for mobile applications

As mobile computing applications have become commonplace, it is increasingly important for them to address end-users’ privacy requirements. Privacy requirements depend on a number of contextual socio-cultural factors to which mobility adds another level of contextual variation. However, traditional requirements elicitation methods do not sufficiently account for contextual factors and therefore cannot be used effectively to represent and analyse the privacy requirements of mobile end users. On the other hand, methods that do investigate contextual factors tend to produce data that does not lend itself to the process of requirements extraction. To address this problem we have developed a Privacy Requirements Distillation approach that employs a problem analysis framework to extract and refine privacy requirements for mobile applications from raw data gathered through empirical studies involving end users. Our approach introduces privacy facets that capture patterns of privacy concerns which are matched against the raw data. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach using qualitative data from an empirical study of a mobile social networking application.

Studying location privacy in mobile applications: 'predator vs. prey' probes

Studying location privacy in mobile applications: ’predator vs. prey’ probes Conference Item How to cite: Thomas, Keerthi; Mancini, Clara; Jedrzejczyk, Lukasz; Bandara, Arosha K.; Joinson, Adam; Price, Blaine A.; Rogers, Yvonne and Nuseibeh, Bashar (2009). Studying location privacy in mobile applications: ’predator vs. prey’ probes. In: Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, 15-17 July 2009, California.