Exploring user preferences for privacy interfaces in mobile sensing applications

  • Authors:
  • Delphine Christin;Andreas Reinhardt;Matthias Hollick;Kai Trumpold

  • Affiliations:
  • TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany;TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany;TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany;Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

By leveraging smartphones as sensing platforms, mobile sensing applications can collect information in an unprecedented quantity and granularity. The transmission of unprocessed sensor readings can, however, pose severe threats to the users' privacy. To protect their privacy, users can apply filters to eliminate privacy-sensitive elements of the sensor readings prior to transmission. The resulting privacy protection depends on the configuration of these filters, which is controlled by the users through a privacy interface. In this paper, we study interface elements for the realization of this interface in order to foster its acceptance and maximize the efficacy of the provided privacy protection. To this end, we have implemented six graphical privacy interfaces, which have been evaluated by 80 participants of our user study. The results show a preference of the users towards differently colored and sized elements to visualize the current level of privacy protection and define their preferred privacy settings.