ACE-CSR Seminar: On Leveraging Communication Metadata as Basis for Privacy Settings' Suggestions

Speaker: Professor Delphine Reinhardt, University of Bonn
UCL Contact: Jonathan Bootle (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 28 Jul 16, 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: Roberts 110

Abstract

Access control is a key principle to protect user privacy online. The combination of both the wealth of user-generated data in online social networks and overly complex user interfaces lead to a high user burden for privacy control, hence making the observance of the above principles difficult. We investigate how communication metadata on smartphones can facilitate providing tailored suggestions for restricted audience groups, thus limiting the sharing of data to the intended users only. To this end, we have performed a user study collecting a dataset including contact names, calls, SMS, MMS, and e-mail on personal smartphones in everyday use. The collected dataset is completed by an explorative questionnaire-based study with 42 participants. Based on the results, we identify expectations and preferences of users, thus facilitating the design of improved solutions.

Professor Delphine Reinhardt

Delphine Reinhardt (née Christin) is assistant professor for Privacy and Security in Ubiquitous Computing at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is also associated to the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE) since 2014. She completed her doctoral degree in computer science with distinction on privacy in participatory sensing in 2013 at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Her doctoral thesis received awards by the Communication and Distributed Systems Group (KuVS) of the German Informatics Society (GI) and Information Technology Society of the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE-ITG) as well as the “Vereinigung von Freunden der Technische Universität zu Darmstadt e.V.” for outstanding academic achievements. Since 2009, she holds a double-degree in electrical engineering from TU Darmstadt and Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l’Electronique et ses Applications (ENSEA), France. Her research interests include privacy, anonymity and pseudonymity, trust and reputation, and usability in ubiquitous computing and beyond.