Paper Reading #17: Privacy Risks Emerging from the Adoption of InnocuousWearable Sensors in the Mobile Environment

• Title: Privacy Risks Emerging from the Adoption of InnocuousWearable Sensors in the Mobile Environment
• Reference Information:
• Andrew Raij, Animikh Ghosh, Santosh Kumar, and Mani Srivastava. 2011. Privacy risks emerging from the adoption of innocuous wearable sensors in the mobile environment.  In <em>Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems</em> (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA,  11-20. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1978945 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1978945
• UIST 2010 New York, New York.
• Author Bios:
• Andrew B Raij has been affiliated with the University of Florida, Memphis and South Florida with more than 40 citations in ACM papers over the last 7 years.
• Animikh Ghosh is a graduate student with this being their first published research paper.
• Santosh Kumar is associated with both The Ohio State University as well as the University of Memphis.  This is his seventeenth research paper over the last 17 years, with an addition 285 citations.
• Mani Bhushan Srivastava is a well known researcher from AT&T Bell Laboratories.  Over the last two decads he has published more than 150 papers through the ACM and has nearly 2,500 citations.
• Summary
• Hypothesis:
•  Researchers hypothesized that user concerns over privacy in terms of data collected from wearable sensors has increased.  Furthermore, this fear is compounded when the users have a personal stake in the data being collected.
• Methods
• The researchers recruited 66 participants from a college campus and divided them into two groups.  The first group, NS, had no personal stake in the data being collected.  The second group, S, did since they were the ones wearing the sensors that were collecting data.  The NS group was simply given a demographics survey and then the privacy survey.  Group S, however, wore sensors that collected data before taking the privacy survey.  Following the survey, Group S then received a review of their analyzed data and then took the survey once again.  Finally, Group S was debriefed to learn more about their concerns.
• Results
• The data collected from the survey supports the notion that having a personal stake int he data increases privacy concerns.  Furthermore, that concern did grow after an analysis of their data had been presented to the participants.  Additionally, factors such as including the timestamp, place and/or duration all increased concerns in varying amounts depending on the activity (such as stress or conversation).
• Contents
• The paper showed evidence to support the idea that privacy concerns over collected data are affected by the relationship with the data as well as extra information collected such as the timestamp.  One participant stated concern about this linking information, "I'd rather people not know that I felt stressed at my particular job or when at my house, because they wouldn't have the whole picture".  Researchers propose removing as much identifiable information as possible, but realize that a middle ground has to be reached because some information is useless unless it can be linked to a particular person.
• Discussion
• Although the researchers were able to effectively support their hypothesis, I did not find this paper particularly interesting or useful.  I seemed to take this information as a known fact, if recent events serve as any indication.  For example, millions of people are upset at Google for collecting wireless information in Europe while building their StreetView database.  Or take a look at the Sony fiasco just earlier this year, where millions of accounts were compromised.  This privacy battle is only set to get worse, as larger amounts of information are stored electronically.  While this information management will have to be performed carefully, I feel that it is integral to further innovations.  Take the widely used example of medical information.  If such information is stored electronically it can be accessed anywhere, at anytime, and appropriate knowledge can  obtained when needed.

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