For the first time in history one billion subscribers are creating records using a single software platform: Facebook. Subscribers create historically significant Facebook records every day, yet there is no concerted effort to preserve these records. Archivists do not agree on whether or how these records will continue to exist, nor do they agree on the best way to preserve these records. At the same time, privacy advocates are concerned that social networking records will continue to exist "forever" and therefore have serious privacy implications. In this study I examine the seemingly opposing viewpoints of privacy scholars and archivists. I find that privacy scholars are concerned that the lack of subscriber control over social networking records threatens privacy over time. Archivists address this lack of control through the concepts of donor agreements and the trusted digital repository, but the application of these concepts to the long-term preservation of Facebook records depends on who will preserve these records. I explore four different ways Facebook records may be preserved. I examine whether the U.S. federal government can and should play a role in encouraging Facebook to preserve records. I find that the U.S. federal government is unlikely to take action. I take a first step in empirically examining the likelihood that individual Facebook subscribers will preserve their own records using both an online survey (n = 144) and focus group to ask Facebook subscribers what they expect to happen to their Facebook records. I find that Facebook subscribers do not trust Facebook, do not think about preservation when they use Facebook, and do not expect their Facebook records to exist forever. This research makes four contributions to existing literature: a discussion of the value of social networking records and whether they should be preserved, a close examination of the differing opinions of archivists and privacy scholars about these records, a discussion of the role public policy might play in the preservation of Facebook records and privacy in the United States, and an empirical exploration of the attitudes and behaviors of a small group of Facebook subscribers related to preservation and privacy. / text

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are being adopted with unprecedented speed. The growth in demand and system complexity increasingly requires collaboration of multiple parties in order to achieve better functionality, efficiency, performance, etc. This poses unique challenges such as information sharing among different parties, utility sharing among different parties, and dishonest and collusive behaviors. Different mobile services may require different types of collaboration and involve different entities in the system. In this work we take a bottom-up approach by first looking at collaboration at the end user level, then the cross level collaboration and finally at the service provider level. Specifically, we first consider a completely distributed service: friend discovery in mobile social networks, where users of a mobile social network work together with each other to discover potential new friends nearby by computing their social proximity. We develop mathematically sound yet highly efficient approaches that simultaneously achieve privacy and verifiability. We then focus on cellular offloading where a cellular service provider seeks third party resource to offload cellular demand, as an example of cross level collaboration. We propose a reverse auction framework: iDEAL, which efficiently allocates cellular resource and third party resource in a joint optimization, effectively incentivize third party resource owners and mitigates dishonest and collusive behaviors. We validate our findings and approaches with real trace driven analysis and simulation, as well as real implementation. Finally we focus on collaboration at the service provider level and propose a double auction framework - DA². DA² allows cellular service providers to reallocate spectrum resource in a dynamic fashsion. It preserves all the desired economic properties. Compared with existing spectrum double auctions, DA² achieves higher efficiency, revenue, and spectrum resource utilization, due to its ability to more accurately capture the competition among buyers, which is characterized by a complex conflict graph. We evaluate DA² and demonstrate its superior performance via simulations on conflict graphs generated with real cell tower locations. / text

Η παρακάτω εργασία έχει τίτλο “Ηλεκτρονικό εμπόριο και διασφάλιση της ιδιωτκότητας”. Συγκεκριμένα, αποτελείται από τέσσερα κεφάλαια. Το πρώτο κεφάλαιο αποτελεί μια εισαγωγή στο ηλεκτρονικό εμπόριο. Στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο, γίνεται αναφορά στις ηλεκτρονικές συναλλαγές καθώς και στους τρόπους με τους οποίους διασφαλίζονται. Στο τρίτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται μια ανάλυση της έννοιας ιδιωτικότητα καθώς και μια συσχέτιση με το ηλεκτρονικό εμπόριο. Τέλος, στο τελευταίο κεφάλαιο της εργασίας αυτής περιγράφεται μια εκτενή ανάλυση των ηλεκτρονικών πληρωμών. / The following work is titled "Electronic commerce and ensure privacy". In particular, consists of four chapters. First chapter is an introduction to electronic commerce. Second chapter refers to electronic transactions and to the ways in which are secured. In the third chapter is made an analysis of the concept of privacy as well as a correlation with e-commerce. Finally, in the last chapter of this work is an extensive analysis of electronic payments.

No description available.

Usable privacy and security has become a significant area of interest for many people in both industry and academia. A better understanding of the knowledge and motivation is an important factor in the design of privacy and security tools. However, users of these tools are a heterogeneous group, and many past studies of user characteristics in the security and privacy domain have looked only at a small subset of factors to define differences between groups of users. The goal of this research is to critically look at the difference between people, their opinions and habits when it comes to issues of privacy and security. To address this goal, 32 in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted and analyzed to look at the heterogenous nature of this community. The participant’s attitudes and actions around the dimensions of knowledge about tools and of motivation for self-protection were used to cluster participants. The traits of these participant clusters are used to create a set of privacy and security personas, or prototypical privacy and security tool users. These personas are a tool for incorporating a broader understanding of the diversity of users into the design of privacy and security tools.

Since early 2010, Facebook.com, the world’s most popular social network site (SNS), has come under a storm of media criticism over the commercial use of its users’ personal information. Yet even as more became known about the fact that Facebook sells publicly shared information to companies for advertising purposes, two years later the SNS amassed one billion members in October 2012. Based on in-depth interviews 30 Millennials (18 to 32-year olds) and 10 Boomers (48 to 58-year olds) that are daily users of Facebook, this dissertation provides a qualitative analysis of attitudes toward privacy and personal information disclosure on Facebook. What steps—if any—are being taken by users to regulate their personal information disclosure? How do users feel about the website selling their personal information to advertisers? What are the benefits of using Facebook and do they outweigh the risks of having one’s information used for commercial purposes? Or is it even seen as a risk at all? What are the sociological implications of users’ answers to these questions? I challenge prevailing conclusions that the intensity of Facebook use is associated with higher levels of social capital and that Facebook is especially useful for maintaining and building bridging ties to one’s acquaintances. On the contrary, among Millennials in my study, the website is used for maintaining bonding ties between close friends and family members, not bridging ties between acquaintances; that the maintaining of bridging social capital is by comparison merely a passive benefit. As well, while the Boomers in my study use Facebook to maintain bridging ties, maintaining social capital is not a consideration. In arriving at this conclusion, I thematically broke out the benefits of using Facebook as Facebook is my life online, Facebook is my primary connection to others, and Facebook is a convenient communication and information tool. As well, the perceived risks of using Facebook involve a lack of privacy and, to a lesser extent, issues of control. For the Millennials and Boomers in my study, the practical benefits of using Facebook outweigh the perceived risks, and the perception of control on the user’s part is a key factor in rationalizing their ongoing use of the website. As a practical application of my findings, I propose how the marketing research industry might apply these findings toward learning more about consumers.

This dissertation is concerned with surveillance, which refers to the monitoring and supervision of populations for specific purposes. Of special interest we the ways in which new technologies are augmenting the power of surveillance in the late twentieth century, and therefore influencing the privacy debate. Three things are noted about this. First, large-scale surveillance by bureaucratic organizations is a product of modernity, not of new technologies. This is evident from Part I of the dissertation, which argues that increased surveillance capacity comes as a result of specific economic and political circumstances that favour the use of technological systems of particular kinds, which invariably feature enhanced capacities. Second, surveillance has two faces; advantages appear alongside serious disadvantages. This is also evident in Part I of the dissertation which suggests that much surveillance theory is dystopian and therefore, an incomplete paradigm. Finally, new technologies facilitate some major magnification of surveillance power; some even argue that they change its character qualitatively. As such, privacy features prominently alongside discussions of electronic surveillance. This is evident in the final two parts of the dissertation which evaluate privacy as a strategy for limiting electronic surveillance. In this regard, Part II examines technical challenges to electronic surveillance, expressed through privacy law in particular, and Part III analyses mobilization challenges, which have to do with the role played by social movements in attempting to bring about broader-based change than mere legislation. Throughout the dissertation, the argument is made that surveillance has become a central feature of contemporary advanced societies and as such, it should be a major concern of both social analysis and political action. This is why the dissertation is divided into distinct, but overlapping, parts, with the first part focusing on social and critical

No abstract available. / Thesis (LL.M.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1977.

As smartphones become more ubiquitous, increasing amounts of information about smartphone users are created, collected, and shared. This information may pose privacy and security risks to the smartphone user. The risks may vary from government surveillance to theft of financial information. Previous work in the area of smartphone privacy and security has both identified specific security flaws and examined users’ expectations and behaviors. However, there has not been a broad examination of the smartphone ecosystem to determine the risks to users from smartphone data sharing and the possible mitigations. Two of the five studies in this work examine the smartphone data sharing ecosystem to identify risks and mitigations. The first study uses multi-stakeholder expert interviews to identify risks to users and the mitigations. A second study examines app developers in order to quantify the risky behaviors and identify opportunities to improve security and privacy. In the remaining three of five studies discussed in this work, we examine one specific risk mitigation that has been popular with policy-makers: privacy notices for consumers. If done well, privacy notices should inform smartphone users about the risks and allow them to make informed decisions about data collection. Unfortunately, previous research has found that existing privacy notices do not help smartphone users, as they are neither noticed nor understood. Through user studies, we evaluate options to improve notices. We identify opportunities to capture the attention of users and improve understanding by examining the timing and content of notices. Overall, this work attempts to inform public policy around smartphone privacy and security. We find novel opportunities to mitigate risks by understanding app developers’ work and behaviors. Also, recognizing the current focus on privacy notices, we attempt to frame the debate by examining how users’ attention to and comprehension of notices can be improved through content and timing.

Machine-readable privacy policies have been developed to help reduce user effort in understanding how websites will use personally identifiable information (PII). The goal of these policies is to enable the user to make informed decisions about the disclosure of personal information in web-based transactions. However, these privacy policies are complex, requiring that a user agent evaluate conformance between the user’s privacy preferences and the site’s privacy policy, and indicate this conformance information to the user. The problem addressed in this thesis is that even with machine-readable policies and current user agents, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of a conflict between privacy preferences and privacy policies. The problem arises partly because current standards operate at the page level: they do not allow a fine-grained treatment of conformance down to the level of a specific field in a web form. In this thesis the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is extended to enable field-level comparisons, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional field-specific conformance information. An evaluation of a prototype agent based on these extensions showed that they allow users to more easily understand how the website privacy policy relates to the user’s privacy preferences, and where conformance conflicts occur.