Rethinking Privacy Policies in Location-Aware Systems: Bridging the Gaps Getween Users Applications, and Policy Systems

该项目将寻求极大地简化用户隐私策略创建的方法。它的前提是，使用来自帮助用户协调或与他人通信的应用程序的上下文信息--如他们的日历、消息联系人和通讯录--可以帮助为位置感知系统创建隐私策略。与早期专注于Web服务等与位置无关的应用程序的隐私方面的工作不同，本项目主要关注位置感知系统中的隐私，在这些系统中，用户携带帮助确定他们位置的设备。这些设备包括支持GPS的手机、无线PDA和笔记本电脑。这项工作将利用密歇根大学新计算机科学与工程大楼中部署的位置感知基础设施。该研究整合了三个关键概念来简化隐私策略规范：(1)隐私元策略：这些是帮助映射用户上下文信息的高级规则。例如，规则可以使用户的位置在预定会议的开始时间附近对会议参与者可用。(2)隐私圈：这些结构帮助用户与其他用户共享隐私元策略。这项研究将评估这样一种假设，即隐私元策略将比普遍存在于现有隐私系统中的低级别策略偏好更容易共享。(3)隐私镜像：这些工具可以帮助用户了解其隐私元策略的影响。特别是，用户可以使用隐私镜像来查看一组元策略将如何向其他用户透露他们在过去事件或计划的未来事件中的位置。这项工作的成功将帮助用户在保护隐私的同时，使用位置信息更好地相互协调和协作。这一点很重要，因为位置感知计算基础设施正开始广泛使用，但它们仍未渗透到主流使用中。这项研究还将产生更好的日历和协调工具，它将有助于推动理解人们如何在位置感知系统的背景下更好地管理他们的隐私的前沿。

This project will seek ways to greatly simplify privacy policy creation for users. It is based on the premise that the use of contextual information from applications that help users to coordinate or communicate with others - such as their calendar, messaging contacts, and address books - can help in creating privacy policies for location-aware systems. In contrast to earlier work on privacy that focused on such location-independent applications as Web services, the focus in this project is primarily on privacy in location-aware systems where users carry devices that help determine their location. These include GPS-enabled cell phones, wireless PDAs, and laptops. This work will leverage a location-aware infrastructure called Whereabouts, which is deployed in the new Computer Science and Engineering building of the University of Michigan.This research integrates three key concepts to simplify privacy policy specifications: (1) Privacy meta-policies: These are high-level rules that help map a user's context information. For example, a rule may make the user's location available to meeting participants near the start time of a scheduled meeting. (2) Privacy circles: These structures help users share privacy meta-policies with other users. The research will evaluate the hypothesis that privacy meta-policies will be much easier to share than low-level policy preferences that are typically available in existing privacy systems for ubiquitous computing. (3) Privacy mirrors: These are tools to help users understand the impact of their privacy meta-policies. In particular, a user can use a privacy mirror to see how a set of meta-policies would have revealed their location to other users for past events or scheduled future events.The success of this work will help users coordinate and collaborate better with each other using location information, while safeguarding privacy. This is important, because location-aware computing infrastructures are starting to become widely available, but they have still not penetrated mainstream use. Better calendaring and coordination tools will also result from this research, and it will help push the frontiers on understanding how people can better manage their privacy in the context of location-aware systems.