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

信息共享和隐私从根本上来说是紧张的，从技术和社会背景的角度研究这种权衡非常重要。普适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。该提案探索了一种新的方法，可以对信息交换提供更精细的控制：仅共享协作所需的信息，其他所有内容都受到保护，并且保护被证明是强大的。这样就可以在无处不在的计算环境中探索令人兴奋的协作应用程序，但否则这是不可能的。具体来说，将开发一类名为“Ant Club Trails”（ACT）的协作应用程序。 蚂蚁俱乐部踪迹背后的想法是整合个人用户留下的“踪迹”信息，并通过协作过滤的方式与其他用户共享，以保护个人隐私。该项目利用密码学、概率推理和计算几何来开发有效的 ACT 系统。它还以社会学和批判理论为指导，设计社会现实且理想的系统。结果应该是对信息共享隐私权衡有更好的科学理解，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：(i) 赋予社区分享社区知识的权力，并可能创造社区知识的市场； ㈡ 研究型研究生的培训； (iii) 本科生参与智能手机上的 ACT 应用程序开发。

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.