Living in the city requires a balance between public and private modes and individual and communal identities. This project explores the subtleties and intricacies of architectural responses to these concerns in a housing development for a tight, typical urban block. Recognizing that the equilibrium between these opposites fluctuates and is different for each inhabitant, the connecting thresholds are expandable and changeable. / Master of Architecture

Many consumers seem to be uncomfortable or unwilling in making online transactions. This lack of trust stems in part from the online exchange process itself where consumers are deprived of many traditional cues that they would use to evaluate this process. This research focuses on consumer perceptions of regulatory governance in online exchanges and how signals of governance might act to increase consumer trust in online transac-tions. An experimental methodology was used to examine the effects of different types of structures on consumer perceptions and to provide direction for public policy makers as well as online businesses and private regulatory entities. / Ph. D.

We are living in a time of fundamental changes in the dynamic between privacy and surveillance. The ubiquity of information technology has changed the ways in which we interact, empowering us through new venues of communication and social intimacy. At the same time, it exposes us to the prying eyes of others, in the shape of governments, companies, or even fellow humans. This creates a challenging environment for the design of 'privacy-aware' applications, exacerbated by a disconnect between abstract knowledge of privacy and concrete information requirements of privacy design frameworks. In this work, we present a novel approach for the modeling of contextual privacy preference and practice. The process guides a 'privacy analyst' through the steps of evaluating, choosing, and deploying appropriate data collection strategies; the verification and validation of the collected data; and the systematic transformation of the dense, unstructured data into a structured domain model. We introduce the Privacy Domain Modeling Language (PDML) to address the representational needs of privacy domain models. Making use of the structure of PDML, we explore the applicability of the information theoretic concept 'entropy' to determine the completeness of the resulting model. We evaluate the utility of the process through its application to the evaluation and re-design of a web application for the management of students' directory information and education records. Through this case study, we demonstrate the potential for automation of the process through the Privacy Analyst Work eNvironment (PAWN) and show the process's seamless integration with existing privacy design frameworks. Finally, we provide evidence for the value of using entropy for determining model completeness, and provide an outlook on future work. / Ph. D.

Wireless networks collect vast amounts of log data concerning usage of the network. This data aids in informing operational needs related to performance, maintenance, etc., but it is also useful for outside researchers in analyzing network operation and user trends. Releasing such information to these outside researchers poses a threat to privacy of users. The dueling need for utility and privacy must be addressed. This thesis studies the concept of differential privacy for fulfillment of these goals of releasing high utility data to researchers while maintaining user privacy. The focus is specifically on physical user trajectories in authentication manager log data since this is a rich type of data that is useful for trend analysis. Authentication manager log data is produced when devices connect to physical access points (APs) and trajectories are sequences of these spatiotemporal connections from one AP to another for the same device. The fulfillment of this goal is pursued with a variable length n-gram model that creates a synthetic database which can be easily ingested by researchers. We found that there are shortcomings to the algorithm chosen in specific application to the data chosen, but differential privacy itself can still be used to release sanitized datasets while maintaining utility if the data has a low sparsity. / Master of Science / Wireless internet networks store historical logs of user device interaction with it. For example, when a phone or other wireless device connects, data is stored by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) about the device, username, time, and location of connection. A database of this type of data can help researchers analyze user trends in the network, but the data contains personally identifiable information for the users. We propose and analyze an algorithm which can release this data in a high utility manner for the researchers, yet maintain user privacy. This is based on a verifiable approach to privacy called differential privacy. This algorithm is found to provide utility and privacy protection for datasets with many users compared to the size of the network.

<p>The current information society is collecting information about individual needs, wants and desires continuously with the help of new technologies. Information systems, such as consumer relationship management (CRM) have a crucial importance when providing personalized services to the customers. This is done by gathering, storing, maintaining and distributing important consumer knowledge throughout the organization. (Chen & Popovich, 2003) However as previous studies have shown, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about threats to their personal privacy when new technologies are integrated into the society (e.g. Cranor et al, 1999; Kervenoael et al, 2007). As these emerging issues are becoming more common in the consumers’ daily lives, it is of great importance to discover their perceptions about it. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the consumers’ perception about their privacy and how they affiliate with their personal information being processed in various organizations.</p><p>The theoretical framework suggests that several factors affects the consumers comfort in sharing personal information to companies, such as the physical environment of the organization, which type of information that is shared, what organization that stores and uses the information, the psychological distance the actors have to each other and how much control the consumers have over the use of their personal information. A selfadministered questionnaire was used to collect the data. The results showed that the majority of the respondents were concerned about the information that is gathered about them, which further emphasises the importance of this study. It was evident that the respondents were more willing to provide demographic and lifestyle information, rather than financial and purchase related information. The results also showed a variation depending on which organization that is considered. The various organizations were categorized into four different groups; Intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distance, depending on the respondents’ perceived comfort in sharing their personal information with them.</p><p>Some significant differences were observed between the various demographic groups as well. One of the findings indicates that men appear to be more comfortable in sharing their personal information to certain companies in comparison to women, due to a higher intellectual risk-propensity. It is argued that the consumers concern for privacy is an important issue to consider for companies. In order to maintain a strong relationship with their customers it should be integrated as an essential part of their CRM-strategies to make their information gathering techniques more efficient.</p>

The current information society is collecting information about individual needs, wants and desires continuously with the help of new technologies. Information systems, such as consumer relationship management (CRM) have a crucial importance when providing personalized services to the customers. This is done by gathering, storing, maintaining and distributing important consumer knowledge throughout the organization. (Chen &amp; Popovich, 2003) However as previous studies have shown, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about threats to their personal privacy when new technologies are integrated into the society (e.g. Cranor et al, 1999; Kervenoael et al, 2007). As these emerging issues are becoming more common in the consumers’ daily lives, it is of great importance to discover their perceptions about it. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the consumers’ perception about their privacy and how they affiliate with their personal information being processed in various organizations. The theoretical framework suggests that several factors affects the consumers comfort in sharing personal information to companies, such as the physical environment of the organization, which type of information that is shared, what organization that stores and uses the information, the psychological distance the actors have to each other and how much control the consumers have over the use of their personal information. A selfadministered questionnaire was used to collect the data. The results showed that the majority of the respondents were concerned about the information that is gathered about them, which further emphasises the importance of this study. It was evident that the respondents were more willing to provide demographic and lifestyle information, rather than financial and purchase related information. The results also showed a variation depending on which organization that is considered. The various organizations were categorized into four different groups; Intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distance, depending on the respondents’ perceived comfort in sharing their personal information with them. Some significant differences were observed between the various demographic groups as well. One of the findings indicates that men appear to be more comfortable in sharing their personal information to certain companies in comparison to women, due to a higher intellectual risk-propensity. It is argued that the consumers concern for privacy is an important issue to consider for companies. In order to maintain a strong relationship with their customers it should be integrated as an essential part of their CRM-strategies to make their information gathering techniques more efficient.

In recent years, the subject of online privacy has been attracting much interest, especially as more Internet users than ever are beginning to care about the privacy of their online activities. Privacy concerns are even prompting legislators in some countries to demand from service providers a more privacy-friendly Internet experience for their citizens. These are welcomed developments and in stark contrast to the practice of Internet censorship and surveillance that legislators in some nations have been known to promote. The development of Internet systems that are able to protect user privacy requires private information retrieval (PIR) schemes that are practical, because no other efficient techniques exist for preserving the confidentiality of the retrieval requests and responses of a user from an Internet system holding unencrypted data. This thesis studies how PIR schemes can be made more relevant and practical for the development of systems that are protective of users' privacy. Private information retrieval schemes are cryptographic constructions for retrieving data from a database, without the database (or database administrator) being able to learn any information about the content of the query. PIR can be applied to preserve the confidentiality of queries to online data sources in many domains, such as online patents, real-time stock quotes, Internet domain names, location-based services, online behavioural profiling and advertising, search engines, and so on. In this thesis, we study private information retrieval and obtain results that seek to make PIR more relevant in practice than all previous treatments of the subject in the literature, which have been mostly theoretical. We also show that PIR is the most computationally efficient known technique for providing access privacy under realistic computation powers and network bandwidths. Our result covers all currently known varieties of PIR schemes. We provide a more detailed summary of our contributions below: Our first result addresses an existing question regarding the computational practicality of private information retrieval schemes. We show that, unlike previously argued, recent lattice-based computational PIR schemes and multi-server information-theoretic PIR schemes are much more computationally efficient than a trivial transfer of the entire PIR database from the server to the client (i.e., trivial download). Our result shows the end-to-end response times of these schemes are one to three orders of magnitude (10--1000 times) smaller than the trivial download of the database for realistic computation powers and network bandwidths. This result extends and clarifies the well-known result of Sion and Carbunar on the computational practicality of PIR. Our second result is a novel approach for preserving the privacy of sensitive constants in an SQL query, which improves substantially upon the earlier work. Specifically, we provide an expressive data access model of SQL atop of the existing rudimentary index- and keyword-based data access models of PIR. The expressive SQL-based model developed results in between 7 and 480 times improvement in query throughput than previous work. We then provide a PIR-based approach for preserving access privacy over large databases. Unlike previously published access privacy approaches, we explore new ideas about privacy-preserving constraint-based query transformations, offline data classification, and privacy-preserving queries to index structures much smaller than the databases. This work addresses an important open problem about how real systems can systematically apply existing PIR schemes for querying large databases. In terms of applications, we apply PIR to solve user privacy problem in the domains of patent database query and location-based services, user and database privacy problems in the domain of the online sales of digital goods, and a scalability problem for the Tor anonymous communication network. We develop practical tools for most of our techniques, which can be useful for adding PIR support to existing and new Internet system designs.

In recent years, the subject of online privacy has been attracting much interest, especially as more Internet users than ever are beginning to care about the privacy of their online activities. Privacy concerns are even prompting legislators in some countries to demand from service providers a more privacy-friendly Internet experience for their citizens. These are welcomed developments and in stark contrast to the practice of Internet censorship and surveillance that legislators in some nations have been known to promote. The development of Internet systems that are able to protect user privacy requires private information retrieval (PIR) schemes that are practical, because no other efficient techniques exist for preserving the confidentiality of the retrieval requests and responses of a user from an Internet system holding unencrypted data. This thesis studies how PIR schemes can be made more relevant and practical for the development of systems that are protective of users' privacy. Private information retrieval schemes are cryptographic constructions for retrieving data from a database, without the database (or database administrator) being able to learn any information about the content of the query. PIR can be applied to preserve the confidentiality of queries to online data sources in many domains, such as online patents, real-time stock quotes, Internet domain names, location-based services, online behavioural profiling and advertising, search engines, and so on. In this thesis, we study private information retrieval and obtain results that seek to make PIR more relevant in practice than all previous treatments of the subject in the literature, which have been mostly theoretical. We also show that PIR is the most computationally efficient known technique for providing access privacy under realistic computation powers and network bandwidths. Our result covers all currently known varieties of PIR schemes. We provide a more detailed summary of our contributions below: Our first result addresses an existing question regarding the computational practicality of private information retrieval schemes. We show that, unlike previously argued, recent lattice-based computational PIR schemes and multi-server information-theoretic PIR schemes are much more computationally efficient than a trivial transfer of the entire PIR database from the server to the client (i.e., trivial download). Our result shows the end-to-end response times of these schemes are one to three orders of magnitude (10--1000 times) smaller than the trivial download of the database for realistic computation powers and network bandwidths. This result extends and clarifies the well-known result of Sion and Carbunar on the computational practicality of PIR. Our second result is a novel approach for preserving the privacy of sensitive constants in an SQL query, which improves substantially upon the earlier work. Specifically, we provide an expressive data access model of SQL atop of the existing rudimentary index- and keyword-based data access models of PIR. The expressive SQL-based model developed results in between 7 and 480 times improvement in query throughput than previous work. We then provide a PIR-based approach for preserving access privacy over large databases. Unlike previously published access privacy approaches, we explore new ideas about privacy-preserving constraint-based query transformations, offline data classification, and privacy-preserving queries to index structures much smaller than the databases. This work addresses an important open problem about how real systems can systematically apply existing PIR schemes for querying large databases. In terms of applications, we apply PIR to solve user privacy problem in the domains of patent database query and location-based services, user and database privacy problems in the domain of the online sales of digital goods, and a scalability problem for the Tor anonymous communication network. We develop practical tools for most of our techniques, which can be useful for adding PIR support to existing and new Internet system designs.

More than a century ago in their definitive work “The Right to Privacy” Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis highlighted the challenges posed to individual privacy by advancing technology. Today’s workplace is characterised by its reliance on computer technology, particularly the use of email and the Internet to perform critical business functions. Increasingly these and other workplace activities are the focus of monitoring by employers. There is little formal regulation of electronic monitoring in Australian or United States workplaces. Without reasonable limits or controls, this has the potential to adversely affect employees’ privacy rights. Australia has a history of legislating to protect privacy rights, whereas the United States has relied on a combination of constitutional guarantees, federal and state statutes, and the common law. This thesis examines a number of existing and proposed statutory and other workplace privacy laws in Australia and the United States. The analysis demonstrates that existing measures fail to adequately regulate monitoring or provide employees with suitable remedies where unjustifiable intrusions occur. The thesis ultimately supports the view that enacting uniform legislation at the national level provides a more effective and comprehensive solution for both employers and employees. Chapter One provides a general introduction and briefly discusses issues relevant to electronic monitoring in the workplace. Chapter Two contains an overview of privacy law as it relates to electronic monitoring in Australian and United States workplaces. In Chapter Three there is an examination of the complaint process and remedies available to a hypothetical employee (Mary) who is concerned about protecting her privacy rights at work. Chapter Four provides an analysis of the major themes emerging from the research, and also discusses the draft national uniform legislation. Chapter Five details the proposed legislation in the form of the Workplace Surveillance and Monitoring Act, and Chapter Six contains the conclusion.

Information privacy concerns are one of the major causes behind a dramatic decline in the readiness of individuals to share their personal information on the Internet. The aim of this research is to explore the information privacy concerns from the users’ perspective. In the focal point of this qualitative study stands the kryast.se website. The healthcare promotion activities that this website carries out involve the sharing by its users of their personal information on the Internet. For this reason, this study takes recourse to the construct of Internet Users’ Information Privacy Concerns (IUIPC) developed by Malhotra, Kim and Agarwal (2004) as its interpretive framework. It was expected that by using both semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation among the users of the above mentioned website, the concerns of its users can be identified through the interpretative lens of the analytical framework that Malhotra et al. (2004) proposed for privacy concerns of Internet Users. The results of this study indicate that the selected conceptual lens has sufficiently accounted for the concerns that website users may have when sharing their personal information on the Internet, while indicating that internet users tend to be reluctant in sharing their sensitive information.