Patricia Cristiane de Souza

Prominent issues for privacy establishment in privacy policies of mobile apps

This article discusses several privacy issues arising from the terms of use and mobile application privacy policies. Guidelines for the establishment of trust and privacy are presented in order to guide designers in the development of applications. Terms of Use and Privacy Policy applications were inspected from the perspective of the guidelines. Special attention was given to the Waze application as character exemplify all the problems and also demonstrate possible solutions from a participatory design session and implementation of the guidelines developed.

Designing a platform to facilitate the development of virtual e-participation environments

Proposals regarding citizen participation in advisory and/or deliberative processes are still scarce in the e-democracy field, according to UNPAN report [8]. Exploiting social network groups with shared or common interests, can be an efficient way to promote participation. This work brings together guidelines based on software reuse techniques and social network concepts in a project to design a platform to facilitate the development of virtual environments with social networks characteristics for e-participation. This platform is based on a participation model called Government-Citizen Interactive Model.

A multi-agent architecture to support ubiquitous applications in smart environments

The implementation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) requires the support of tools and technologies capable of interpreting large quantities of data collected from different sources comprising sensors networks, mobile devices, social networks and other systems. The agent-oriented paradigm is particularly appropriate for such a scenario, because agents offer some important features, like proactive and reactive reasoning, autonomy, social abilities and learning. In this work we propose a middleware architecture to support the development of applications in the scope of Smart Cities, describing its main characteristics and requirements. The Devices, Environments and Social networks Integration Architecture (DESIA) proposal includes emerging technologies such as social networks, cloud computing and digital ecosystems, emphasizing security and privacy, key aspects not always covered by other architectures.

Human Values in HCI: a challenge for the GrandIHC-BR

In 2012, the Brazilian HCI community identified Five Grand Research Challenges in Brazil, for the timespan between 2012 and 2022. In this paper, we discuss 3 issues: (a)what our community has done so far to advance with Challenge 4 - Human Values; (b) what results had effective impacts; and (c) what challenges remain and/or have come up. To do so, we present our perspectives on studies related to the three central axes of this challenge (ethics, privacy and post-mortem digital legacy), along with their potential impacts. Our observations point out that a compartmentalized, narrow mindset might be preventing us from advancing to greater reflections, which could challenge paradigms and articulate the aforementioned axes within the Grand Challenges.

Establishing Guidelines for User Quality of Experience in Ubiquitous Systems

Interaction Technologies are designed to provide continuous, shared and user-friendly access in the current computerized world. Ubiquitous computing includes several features, such as invisibility, continuous interaction and various modes of interaction, which are not present in the paradigm of traditional computing. A relevant issue is that existing recommendations for quality user experience in traditional computing may not prove to be sufficient for the field of ubiquitous computing. In this research a systematic review method was chosen to develop a theoretical basis of the literature about the research theme “investigate user experience in ubiquitous systems”, followed by a qualitative analysis of the selected papers. One result of this work is the guidelines establishment which aims to assist the ubiquitous system design favoring the user experience quality. A case study of the Waze application was carried out to analyze the applicability of the proposed guidelines.

Mobile-PrivAccess: Method for Analyzing Accessibility in Mobile Applications from the Privacy Viewpoint Abiding by W3C

Despite accessibility is a right ensured by the legislation, it is still a challenge to People with Disability and Limitations (PwDaL), considering Limitations, for instance, those deriving from aging and low literacy. In Digital Systems (DS) restrictions on use by PwDaL are easily found which even more excludes them from society which preponderantly interacts with the technology. Recognizing the importance of ensuring accessibility and privacy to PwDaL we investigated the problems of accessibility and digital privacy in the context of mobile applications and proposed the Mobile-PrivAccess method. This method allows applying the W3C directives to assess the accessibility to mobile applications privacy resources, without the participation of PwDaL. The absence of these users spares unnecessary efforts at the preliminary stages of the application assessment. The method based on an inspection technique is a four-stage structured process with established goals containing support artifacts for specific phases. For applying the method, two professionals with knowledge on and or experience in digital inclusion for PwDaL and/or in the W3C standards are required. For verifying the viability of the method proposed an experiment was performed adopting the proposed method to assess the accessibility of the Waze App [13] in three operating systems, as follows: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The results demonstrated the viability of the method indicating that Waze meets few success criteria and presents a number of accessibility barriers to different PwDaL profiles.

Early Privacy: Approximating Mental Models in the Definition of Privacy Requirements in Systems Design

Privacy is a relevant concern in the intelligent systems environment, Internet of Things and Ubiquitous Computing, because of indiscriminate data collection and sharing practices, and the distancing of mental models between users and software designers. This paper articulates challenges for the establishment of privacy and proposes a method for eliciting privacy requirements in ubiquitous systems in order to think about privacy in the early stages of design, being a practice that cross through technology projects as a concern to be evolved along with the software artifacts. A use example of the method was performed, deriving privacy requirements for a travel-sharing application. Software artifacts were constructed from the requirements and were utilized in a participatory design session to project elements of privacy. At the end of the process, we obtained prototypes of medium fidelity focused from the beginning in privacy, articulating elements for its protection, configuration and comprehension by users.

A Study on the Use of Personas as a Usability Evaluation Method

The user modelling technique known as personas has obtained excellent results over the last years. Literature about this theme shows different forms of using the concept of personas in the moment of software conceiving, however, the good results obtained with this technique allow to catch a glimpse of a more diverse use of this method. In this context, this study performed a usability evaluation method of Facebooks privacy configurations, the most popular social network worldwide, aiming to verify the use of the personas concept as a usability assessment technique.