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

从根本上说，信息共享和隐私处于紧张状态，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不存在严重隐私风险的情况下利用这些可能性。该提案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，并且保护是可以证明的。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”的协作应用程序。 Ant Club Trails背后的想法是联合收割机将个人用户留下的“足迹”信息结合起来，并通过协同过滤与其他用户共享，以保护个人隐私。该项目利用密码学，概率推理和计算几何学来开发ACT系统。它还以社会学和批判理论为指导，设计社会现实和理想的制度。其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范围。 这项工作的更广泛影响包括：（一）增强社区分享社区知识并在可能的情况下开发社区知识市场的能力;（二）培训研究生;（三）让大学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.