Minimising Information Asymmetry by UsingProxies

Anders Kofod-Petersen

IMIS 2010

1 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Outline

1 Motivation and BackgroundMotivationFindMyFriendsFriendRadar (and Find Peer Anton)The principle

2 Privacy in the AAL domainMpower and UniversAALCurrent situationUsing a proxy to minimise asymmetry

3 Summary

2 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Motivation and Background Motivation

Motivation

Privacy is important when we (deliberately) share dataIt is even more important when we share sensed dataWe really like to monitor people, in particular elderly (AAL)"Informed users" tend to prefer coolness over privacyBut what about non-competent or non-informed users?

3 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Motivation and Background FindMyFriends

FindMyFriends

Location-based system implemented at a student festival2769 registered users1661 users with registered tagsOnly privacy mechanism was "blocking a user"Main finding was that the benefits outweighed any negativeaspects (n=207, cl 95 %, ci 6.55 %)

4 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Motivation and Background FriendRadar (and Find Peer Anton)

FriendRadar (and Find Peer Anton)

FriendRadar was a city-wide system that allows you to seethe location of your friendsFind Peer Anton was the same just "GSM-wide"Privacy mechanism were:

1 Subscribing to another’s presence or location information isonly possible by mutual sharing.

2 Being invisible stops the user from receiving other users’information.

3 Cancelling a subscription removes the cancelled user formthe list and marks the cancelling user as offline in otherusers’ list.

Main finding was that "coolness" outweighed any privacyissues (n=24)

5 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Motivation and Background The principle

Principle of minimal asymmetry

"A privacy-aware system should minimize theasymmetry of information between data owners anddata collectors and data users, by:

Decreasing the flow of information from data ownersto data collectors and users.

Increasing the flow of information from data collectorsand users back to the data owners."

[Jiang et al., 2002]

Decreasing information flow from the data owner improvescontrol.Increasing information flow from the collector providesfeedback.

6 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Privacy in the AAL domain Mpower and UniversAAL

MPower and UniversAAL

MPower was a FP6 project that constructed a collaborativeenvironment for distributed and shared care

UniversAAL is a continuation (FP7) of, among othersMPower that aim at consolidation one European platformfor AAL services

7 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Privacy in the AAL domain Current situation

Current situation

MPOWER

ServiceService

Sensor 1

Sensor 2

Sensor 3

Sensor 4

Sensor 5

?

Service

8 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Privacy in the AAL domain Using a proxy to minimise asymmetry

Using a proxy to minimise asymmetry

?

9 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies

Summary

Summary

We have seen that "usefulness" often outweighs privacyconcernsSome examples of systems that attempts to minimiseasymmetry has been describedNon-competent and non-informed users are in a specialsituationMinimising asymmetry has been suggested as a suitablemechanism, also in the AAL domainIt has been argued that designing AAL systems to(explicitly) care for proxies is necessaryApplying this principle is basically an engineering problemHowever, the non-technical issues needs to be tackled

10 Anders Kofod-Petersen Minimising Information Asymmetry by Using Proxies