Titulo Estágio
Mobile Application for Evolvable and Context-aware User Privacy Protection
Áreas de especialidade
Comunicações, Serviços e Infraestruturas
Sistemas Inteligentes
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
The premise of ubiquitous and pervasive computing through an always-connected at any-time paradigm enabled by smart-phones has led to an increasing loss of personal privacy. This is favored by a ask-once use-everytime approach, in which mobile phone applications ask for access to certain types of information (many times much more than actually needed) at install, and have access to that information at all times without user intervention. This raises high-risk privacy concerns, specially when multiple applications and institutions share information about their users, easily leading to a mobile big-brother scenario.
Objetivo
The goal of this thesis is to develop a privacy-protection application for mobile phones. This application shall protect the user from the constant ravaging of personal information that is already happening and is foreseeable to increase in upcoming years.
In particular, the application shall be able to adapt to different contexts (e.g. the user may have more strict privacy preferences at home, than in a public location). It should be able to block access to applications that do not comply with the user's privacy preferences for a given context. It should also be able to evolve and learn from an initial set of user privacy preferences, therefore providing the correct privacy preserving response, even when the user has not specified its preference for a specific situation.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
1) State-of-the art study on:
- privacy-enabling mechanisms for mobile devices
- learning/recommendation mechanisms for evolvable user privacies
2) Study and definition of data formats for representation and storage of applications' permissions and users' privacy preferences
3) Investigation of user interface and gamification strategies to foster user involvement and raise user awareness to privacy threats and implications
4) Intermediate report
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
1) Development of a mobile application to protect user privacy. This application should perform the following actions:
- retrieve context information from the location of the user (e.g. relating GPS information with the foursquare DB of categories and locations: https://developer.foursquare.com/categorytree)
- make privacy-related queries to the user in order to define an initial set of privacy preferences
- develop a privacy proxy that maps applications requests with users' privacy preferences, and blocks applications that should not have access to certain types of information
2) Implementation of learning/recommendation mechanisms to define the privacy preferences in response to situations in which privacy preferences have not been specified by the user
3) Development and implementation of techniques to foster user involvement with the application
4) Evaluation of the proposed privacy/learning system
5) Writing of scientific article and dissertation
Condições
3 month scholarship with value of 385€ per month
Orientador
João Vilela, Pedro Abreu
jpvilela@dei.uc.pt 📩