Reading #17 : Privacy Risks Emerging from the Adoption of Innocuous Wearable Sensors in the Mobile Environment

References:
Privacy Risks Emerging from the Adoption of Innocuous Wearable Sensors in the Mobile Environment by Andrew Raij, Santosh Kumar, Animikh Ghosh, and Mani Srivastava.   Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.


Author Bios:
Andrew Raij is a post doctoral student at the University of Memphis.
Santosh Kumar is a professor at the University of Memphis.
Animikh Ghosh is a research associate at Infosys Labs.
Mani Srivastava is a professor at UCLA.


Summary:
Hypothesis:
That the wearing of sensors on ones body can, in fact, be a privacy concern.


Methods:
The authors had two groups, both of which filled out a survey before hand. They groups were then observed for several days and then shown some results of those observations. One group had no sensor, the other group was asked to wear their sensor for 3 days. At the end of the experiment the subjects were asked to fill out another survey about their feelings on the subject.


Results:
People, understandable, care the least about privacy on data that is not relevant to them. The group being watched also showed more privacy concerns than those who weren't. People who wore the sensors said that they were afraid of people knowing where they were at any given time. They had concerns about who the data that was collected would be shared with.


Contents:
The authors in this paper address the need for increased privacy. They establish an experiment and obtain groups of subjects to test a users feeling when they are tracked by a senors. They observe how this makes users feel and how they change to adapt to it.


Discussion:
This paper i think is really relevant to the world in general as it is getting smaller. It becomes more and more difficult to keep things private now than it was even ten years ago. Everything is done online which means a lot of personal information is out there for someone to potentially take. This is a neat extrapolation of that onto getting other types of private information such as location. Overall a very relevant paper.