Social inference risk modeling:In mobile and social applications

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

12-4-2009

Abstract

The emphasis of emerging mobile and Web 2.0 applications on collaboration and communication increases threats to user privacy. A serious, yet under-researched privacy risk results from social inferences about user identity, location and other personal information. In this paper, after analyzing the social inference problem theoretically, we assess the extent of the risk to users of computer-mediated communication and location based applications through 1) a laboratory experimentation, 2) a mobile phone field study, and 3) simulation. Our experimentation involved the use of 530 user-created profiles and a 292-subject laboratory chat-study between strangers. The field study explored the patterns of collocation and anonymity of 165 users using a location-aware mobile-phone survey tool. The empirical data was then utilized to populate large-scale simulations of the social inference risk. The work validates the theoretical model, highlights the seriousness of the social inference risk, and shows how the extent and nature of the risk differs for different classes of social computing applications. We conclude with a discussion of the system design implications. © 2009 IEEE.

Identifier

70849100654 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9780769538235]

Publication Title

Proceedings 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering Cse 2009

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/CSE.2009.237

First Page

125

Last Page

132

Volume

3

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