SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Contextual Integrity: From Theory to Practice

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Current user-facing computer systems apply a "notice and consent" approach to managing user privacy: the user is presented with a privacy notice and then must consent to its terms. Decades of prior research show that this approach is unmanageable: policies are vague, ambiguous, and often include legal terms that make them very difficult to understand, if they are even read at all. These problems are magnified across Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which may not include displays to present privacy information, and may become so ubiquitous in the environment that users cannot possibly determine when their data is actually being captured. This project aims to solve these problems by designing new privacy management systems that automatically infer users' context-specific privacy expectations and then use them to manage the data-capture and data-sharing behaviors of mobile and IoT devices in users' environments. The goals of this research are to better understand privacy expectations, design privacy controls that require minimal user intervention, and demonstrate how emergent technologies can be designed to empower users to best manage their privacy.The theory of "Privacy as Contextual Integrity" (CI) postulates that privacy expectations are based on contextual norms, and that privacy violations occur when data flows in ways that defy these norms. The framework can be applied by modeling data flows in terms of the data type, sender, recipient, as well as the specific context (i.e., the purpose for which data is being shared). While this model makes intuitive sense, there are several open research questions that have prevented it from being applied in computer systems. Specifically, the project investigates how privacy expectations change across varying contexts through the use of surveys, interviews, and behavioral studies, and designs systems to automatically infer contextual information so that the process of determining whether or not a data flow is likely to defy user expectations can be automated. The investigators develop a prototype of the novel privacy controls and validate their usability and privacy-preserving properties through iterative laboratory and field experiments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.