Peer-to-Peer (P2P) tools are used exclusively when their users are connected to the Internet, thus constituting a good foundation for online commercials to help finance further tool development. Although software that displays ads (adware) is very common, activity monitoring or information collecting software that spies on the users (spyware) may be installed together with the P2P tool. This paper will present a method for examining P2P tool installations and present test results from a few of the most common P2P tools. It will also discuss whether these tools, with their bundled software, make any privacy intrusions. Finally, the method itself will be evaluated and suggestions of refinements will be proposed.

On the Internet today, users are accustomed to disclosing personal information when accessing a new service. When a user does so, there is rarely a system in place which allows the user to monitor how his or her information is actually shared or used by services. One proposed solution to this problem is to have services perform transparency logging on behalf of users, informing them how their data is processed as processing is taking place. We have recently participated in a collaboration to develop a privacy-preserving secure logging scheme that can be used for the purpose of transparency logging. As part of that collaboration we created a proof of concept implementation. In this thesis, we elaborate on that implementation and integrate it with a minimalistic open source issue-tracking system. We evaluate the amount of work required to integrate the logging system and attempt to identify potential integration problems. Using this issue-tracking system we then design and implement a scenario that demonstrates the value of the logging system to the average user.

When individuals access services online they are often required to disclose excessive amounts of personally identifiable information, with little to no transparency on how the information is used. One of the goals of the EU research project PrimeLife is to help people regain control of their private sphere in today's networked world. As part of PrimeLife a software prototype, named the PRIME Core, is being developed that contains a number of different privacy enhancing technologies. This thesis describes the implementation and integration of a privacy-friendly secure logging module into the PRIME Core. The logging module's purpose is to provide transparency logging to the PRIME Core, giving individuals access to a detailed log of how their disclosed personally identifiable information is used, in a secure and privacy friendly manner. The thesis resulted in a privacy-friendly secure logging module being implemented into the PRIME Core. The client for the logging module still lacks features to be suitable for use by the Data Track. Further research is needed to make the implementation mitigate the risks posed by memory and disk forensics.

Sweden healthcare adopted much ICT (information and communication technology). It is a highly information intensive place. This thesis gives a brief description of the background of healthcare in Sweden and ICT adoption in healthcare, introduces an Information system security model, describes the technology and law about data privacy and carries out a case through questionnaire and interview.

As computers are increasingly more integrated into our daily lives, we need aiding mechanisms for separating legitimate software from their unwanted counterparts. We use the term Privacy-Invasive Software (PIS) to refer to such illegitimate software, sometimes loosely labelled as spyware. In this thesis, we include an introduction to PIS, and how it differs from both legitimate and traditionally malicious software. We also present empirical measurements indicating the effects that PIS have on infected computers and networks. An important contribution of this work is a classification of PIS in which we target both the level of user consent, as well as the degree of user consequences associated with PIS. These consequences, affecting both users and their computers, form a global problem that deteriorates a vast number of users’ computer experiences today. As a way to hinder, or at least mitigate, this development we argue for more user-oriented countermeasures that focus on informing users about the behaviour and consequences associated with using a particular software. In addition to current reactive countermeasures, we also need preventive tools dealing with the threat of PIS before it enters users’ computers. Collaborative reputation systems present an interesting way forward towards such preventive and user-oriented countermeasures against PIS. Moving the software reputations from old channels (such as computer magazines or friends’ recommendations) into an instantly fast reputation system would be beneficial for the users when distinguishing unwanted software from legitimate. It is important that such a reputation system is designed to address antagonistic intentions from both individual users and groups thereof, so that users could depend on the reputations. This would allow users to reach more informed decisions by taking the reported consequences into account when deciding whether they want a specific software to enter their computer or not. / Copyright © 19xx/20xx IEEE. Reprinted from (all relevant publication info). This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of BTH's products or services Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a blank email message to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.

We present the results of a study designed to measure the impact of interruptive advertising on consumers' willingness to pay for products bearing the advertiser's brand. Subjects participating in a controlled experiment were exposed to ads that diverted their attention from a computer game they were testing. We found that ads significantly lowered subjects' willingness to pay for a good associated with the advertised brand. We did not find conclusive evidence that providing some level of user control over the appearance of ads mitigated the negative impact of ad interruption. Our results contribute to the research on the economic impact of advertising, and introduce a method of measuring actual (as opposed to self-reported) willingness to pay in experimental marketing research.

Real social graphs datasets are fundamental to understanding a variety of phenomena, such as epidemics, crowd management and political uprisings, yet releasing digital recordings of such datasets exposes the participants to privacy violations. A safer approach to making real social network topologies available is to anonymize them by modifying the graph structure enough as to decouple the node identity from its social ties, yet preserving the graph characteristics in aggregate. At scale, this approach comes with a significant challenge in computational complexity. This thesis questions the need to structurally anonymize very large graphs. Intuitively, the larger the graph, the easier for an individual to be “lost in the crowd”. On the other hand, at scale new topological structures may emerge, and those can expose individual nodes in ways that smaller structures do not. To answer this problem, this work introduces a set of metrics for measuring the indistinguishability of nodes in large-scale social networks independent of attack models and shows how different graphs have different levels of inherent indistinguishability of nodes. Moreover, we show that when varying the size of a graph, the inherent node indistinguishability decreases with the size of the graph. In other words, the larger a graph of a graph structure, the higher the indistinguishability of its nodes.

This thesis traces the development of the Chinese government’s attempts to solicit corruption reports from citizens via online platforms such as websites and smartphone applications. It argues that this endeavour has proven largely unsuccessful, and what success it has enjoyed is not sustainable. The reason for this failure is that prospective complainants are offered little incentive to report corruption via official channels. Complaints on social media require less effort and are more likely to lead to investigations than complaints delivered straight to the government, though neither channel is particularly effective. The regime’s concern for social stability has led to widespread censorship of corruption discussion on social media, as well as a slew of laws and regulations banning the behaviour. Though it is difficult to predict what the long-term results of these policies will be, it seems likely that the regime’s ability to collect corruption data will remain limited. / Graduate / 2018-07-14

There is often a misalignment between requirements for keeping data owners' information private and real data processing practices, and this can lead to violations of privacy. Specifying and implementing appropriate policies to control a user's access to a system and its resource is critical for keeping data owners' information private. Traditionally, policy specification is isolated from requirements analysis, which often results in data processing practices that are not in compliance with data owners' requirements. This thesis investigates a development scheme that integrates policy specification into requirements analysis and approach design. It suggests that, while we derive specification from requirements analysis, we can also improve requirements and approach design through privacy preservation specification by clarifying ambiguities in the requirements and resolving inconsistencies between requirements and data processing practices. This claim is supported by the requirements analysis and specification of a purpose based access control approach for privacy preservation. The purpose-based access control method consists of an entity of purpose, which expresses requirements for keeping personal information private from a data owner's point of view. The requirements analysis is helped by the specification of the entities, the relationships, the invariants corresponding to the requirements, and the model operations along with proof obligations of their satisfiability. That specification results in a complete purpose based access control model in the case of an intra-organisation scenario. The development scheme has also been applied for privacy preservation in distributed collaborative environments. Distributed computing environments pose further challenges for keeping personal information private. Design considerations are taken for ensuring that personal information is accessed from two or more parties only if agreed privacy policies and privacy preferences are satisfied, and for facilitating privacy policies matching and privacy preference compliance among distributed collaborative organisations. The work presented in this thesis should be of value to researchers on privacy protection methods, to whom the purpose-based access control model has been made available for privacy property verification, and to researchers on privacy specification, who will be able to incorporate specification into the requirements analysis.

The researcher attempts to assess in which respect the privacy of former President Kgalema Motlanthe may have been invaded during his presidency, in view of journalistic ethics and press codes currently in effect. The study will explore media practices based on media freedom at the time of publication, and assess whether this freedom is understood to suggest the infringement of the right to privacy in the coverage of the private lives of politicians in the media. This study will therefore examine a sample of articles from the Sunday Times, City Press and Mail and Guardian, covering former President Kgalema Motlanthe’s public behaviour that related to his private life, assess which aspects of his demeanour became the subject of media coverage, and correlate such reporting trends with fluctuations in his political career. The researcher will focus on the period when Kgalema Motlanthe was at the helm as the Head of State – from October 2008 to April 2009, and consider particularly the trends in the sampled press reports regarding his private life. The study furthermore examines some of the legislative and normative changes that affected the media in South Africa after democratisation, to correlate the trends observed in the press coverage with legislation. This further serves to identify possible gray areas that arise from reporting on the freedom of the press and may lead to the invasion of privacy.