Privacy risks emerging from the adoption of innocuous wearable sensors in the mobile environment

ABSTRACT

Wearable sensors are revolutionizing healthcare and science by enabling capture of physiological, psychological, and behavioral measurements in natural environments. However, these seemingly innocuous measurements can be used to infer potentially private behaviors such as stress, conversation, smoking, drinking, illicit drug usage, and others. We conducted a study to assess how concerned people are about disclosure of a variety of behaviors and contexts that are embedded in wearable sensor data. Our results show participants are most concerned about disclosures of conversation episodes and stress - inferences that are not yet widely publicized. These concerns are mediated by temporal and physical context associated with the data and the participant's personal stake in the data. Our results provide key guidance on the extent to which people understand the potential for harm and data characteristics researchers should focus on to reduce the perceived harm from such datasets.

References

1. AliveTec. Activity and Heart Monitor. http://www.alivetec.com/products.htm.
2. AutoSense. AutoSense: A Wireless Sensor System to Quantify Personal Exposures to Psychosocial Stress and Addictive Substances in Natural Environments. http://sites.google.com/site/autosenseproject.
3. M. Barbaro, T. Zeller, and S. Hansell. A Face is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. New York Times, 2006.
4. L. Barkhuus and A. Dey. Location-Based Services for Mobile Telephony: a Study of Users' Privacy Concerns. In Proc. Interact, 2003.
5. A. Brush, J. Krumm, and J. Scott. Exploring end user preferences for location obfuscation, location-based services, and the value of location. In ACM UbiComp, pages 95--104, 2010.
6. S. Consolvo, J. Jung, B. Greenstein, P. Powledge, G. Maganis, and D. Avrahami. The Wi-Fi privacy ticker: improving awareness & control of personal information exposure on Wi-Fi. In ACM UbiComp, pages 321--330, 2010.
7. S. Consolvo, D. McDonald, T. Toscos, M. Chen, J. Froehlich, B. Harrison, P. Klasnja, A. LaMarca, L. LeGrand, R. Libby, et al. Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of ubifit garden. In ACM SIGCHI, 2008.
8. S. Consolvo, I. Smith, T. Matthews, A. LaMarca, J. Tabert, and P. Powledge. Location Disclosure to Social Relations: Why,When, & What People Want to Share. In ACM SIGCHI, 2005.
9. A. Dey and G. Abowd. Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness. In ACM SIGCHI workshop, 2000.
10. FieldStream. FieldStream: Network Data Services for Exposure Biology Studies in Natural Environments. http://www.fieldstream.org/.
11. R. Ganti, N. Pham, Y. Tsai, and T. Abdelzaher. PoolView: Stream Privacy for Grassroots Participatory Sensing. In ACM SenSys, 2008.
12. S. Guha, K. Plarre, D. Lissner, S. Mitra, B. Krishna, P. Dutta, and S. Kumar. AutoWitness: Locating and Tracking Stolen Property while Tolerating GPS and Radio Outages. In ACM SenSys, 2010.
13. S. Hansell. AOL Removes Search Data on Vast Group of Web Users. New York Times, 2006.
14. G. Iachello and G. Abowd. Privacy and proportionality: adapting legal evaluation techniques to inform design in ubiquitous computing. In ACM SIGCHI, pages 91--100, 2005.
15. G. Iachello, K. Truong, G. Abowd, G. Hayes, and M. Stevens. Prototyping and sampling experience to evaluate ubiquitous computing privacy in the real world. In ACM SIGCHI, pages 1009--1018, 2006.
16. W. Karim. Privacy Implications of Personal Locators: Why You Should Think Twice before Voluntarily Availing Yourself to GPS Monitoring, The. Wash. UJL & Pol'y, 14, 2004.
17. P. Klasnja, S. Consolvo, T. Choudhury, R. Beckwith, and J. Hightower. Exploring privacy concerns about personal sensing. Pervasive Computing, pages 176--183, 2009.
18. P. Klasnja, S. Consolvo, J. Jung, B. Greenstein, L. LeGrand, P. Powledge, and D. Wetherall. "When I am on Wi-Fi, I am fearless:" privacy concerns & practices in everydayWi-Fi use. In ACM SIGCHI, pages 1993--2002, 2009.
19. J. Krumm. Inference Attacks on Location Tracks. Pervasive Computing, 2007.
20. R. Lazarus. Stress and emotion: A new synthesis. Springer Publishing Company, 2006.
21. N. Li, T. Li, and S. Venkatasubramanian. t-Closeness: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity and l-Diversity. In IEEE ICDE, 2007.
22. K. Lorincz, B. Chen, G. Challen, A. Chowdhury, S. Patel, P. Bonato, and M. Welsh. Mercury: A Wearable Sensor Network Platform for High-Fidelity Motion Analysis. In ACM SenSys, 2009.
23. A. Machanavajjhala, D. Kifer, J. Gehrke, and M. Venkitasubramaniam. l-diversity: Privacy beyond k-Anonymity. ACM TKDD, 2007.
24. C. Mancini, K. Thomas, Y. Rogers, B. Price, L. Jedrzejczyk, A. Bandara, A. Joinson, and B. Nuseibeh. From spaces to places: emerging contexts in mobile privacy. In ACM UbiComp, 2009.
25. D. McFarland. Respiratory Markers of Conversational Interaction. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44(1), 2001.
26. M. Mun, S. Reddy, K. Shilton, N. Yau, J. Burke, D. Estrin, M. Hansen, E. Howard, R. West, and P. Boda. Peir, The Personal Environmental Impact Report, as a Platform for Participatory Sensing Systems Research. In ACM MobiSys, 2009.
27. A. Narayanan and V. Shmatikov. Robust De-Anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets. In IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy, 2008.
28. A. Narayanan and V. Shmatikov. De-Anonymizing Social Networks. In IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy, 2009.
29. S. Oliveira and O. Zaiane. Privacy Preserving Clustering by Data Transformation. J. Information & Data Management, 1(1), 2010.
30. L. Palen and P. Dourish. Unpacking Privacy for a Networked World. In ACM SIGCHI, 2003.
31. S. Patil and J. Lai. Who gets to know what when: configuring privacy permissions in an awareness application. In ACM SIGCHI, 2005.
32. L. Sweeney. Achieving k-anonymity Privacy Protection Using Generalization and Suppression. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, 10(5), 2002.
33. E. Toch, J. Cranshaw, P. Drielsma, J. Tsai, P. Kelley, J. Springfield, L. Cranor, J. Hong, and N. Sadeh. Empirical Models of Privacy in Location Sharing. In ACM UbiComp, 2010.
34. E. Toch, N. Sadeh, and J. Hong. Generating default privacy policies for online social networks. In ACM SIGCHI extended abstracts, pages 4243--4248, 2010.
35. J. Tsai, P. Kelley, P. Drielsma, L. Cranor, J. Hong, and N. Sadeh. Who's viewed you?: the impact of feedback in a mobile location-sharing application. In ACM SIGCHI, 2009.
36. Zephyr Technology. BioHarness BT. http://www.zephyr-technology.com/bioharness-bt.html.

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

    • Personal computers and PC applications

• Computer systems organization

  • Embedded and cyber-physical systems

    • Sensors and actuators

• Security and privacy

  • Human and societal aspects of security and privacy

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy

    • Privacy policies