Users' Concern for Privacy in Context-Aware Reasoning Systems
This addresses privacy issues for users of context-aware systems, providing insights into specific concerns, but it is incremental as it builds on existing survey-based research in privacy.
The study investigated user privacy concerns in context-aware reasoning systems, finding that people are more worried about third-party access to environmental sensor data than physiological data, and about unfamiliar versus familiar third parties, with concerns predicted by beliefs about data inference and computer science background.
Context-aware reasoning systems allow drawing sophisticated inferences about users' behaviour and physiological condition, by aggregating data from seemingly unrelated sources. We conducted a general population online survey to evaluate users' concern about the privacy of data gathered by these systems. We found that people are more concerned about third parties accessing data gathered by environmental sensors as compared to physiological sensors. Participants also indicated greater concern about unfamiliar third parties (e.g., private companies) as opposed to familiar third parties (e.g., relatives). We further found that these concerns are predicted and (to a lesser degree) causally affected by people's beliefs about how much can be inferred from these types of data, as well as by their background in computer science.