Ant Club Trails: Privacy and Collaboration in an Ubiquitous Computing World

信息共享和隐私从根本上是紧张的，从技术和社会背景的角度来研究这种权衡是很重要的。无处不在的计算的出现为获取和共享信息开辟了全新的可能性，但今天的方法无法在没有严重隐私风险的情况下利用这些可能性。该建议探索了一种新的方法，该方法对信息交换提供了更精细的控制：只有协作所需的信息被共享，其他所有信息都受到保护，并且保护可以证明是强大的。这样就有可能在无处不在的计算环境中探索协作应用程序，这是令人兴奋的，但在其他情况下是不可能的。具体而言，将开发一类称为“蚂蚁俱乐部小径”（ACT）的协作应用程序。Ant Club Trails背后的想法是将个人用户留下的“Trails”信息组合在一起，并以保护个人隐私的方式通过协同过滤与其他用户共享。该项目利用密码学、概率推理和计算几何来开发工作ACT系统。它还以社会学和批判理论为指导，旨在设计社会现实和理想的系统。结果应该是对信息共享隐私权衡的更好的科学理解，以及保护隐私的协作应用程序的更大前景。这项工作的更广泛影响包括：(i)授权社区分享社区知识，并可能使社区知识成为市场；（二）培养研究型研究生；（iii）让本科生参与开发智能手机上的ACT应用程序。

Information-sharing and privacy are fundamentally in tension, and it is important to study the trade-off from both technical and social-contextual perspectives. The emergence of ubiquitous computing opens up radical new possibilities for acquiring and sharing information, but today's methods cannot exploit the possibilites without grave privacy risks. This proposal explores a new methodology that provides much finer control over information exchange: only the information needed for the collaboration is shared, everything else is protected, and protection is provably strong. It is then possible to explore collaborative applications in ubiquitous computing settings that are exciting, but which would be otherwise impossible. Specifically, a class of collaborative applications called ``Ant Club Trails'' (ACT) will be developed. The idea behind Ant Club Trails is to combine information from the ``trails'' left by individual users, and to share it with other users by collaborative filtering in a way which protects individual privacy. The project draws on cryptography, probabilistic reasoning and computational geometry for the development of working ACT systems. It is also guided by sociology and critical theory toward design of socially realistic and desirable systems. The outcome should be better scientific understanding of the information-sharing privacy tradeoff, and a larger landscape of collaborative applications that protect privacy. The broader impacts of the work include: (i) empowerment of communities to share and possibly make a market in community knowledge; (ii) training of research graduate students; and (iii) involvement of undergraduates in developing ACT applications on smart phones.