Project Name: Usable Privacy and Security for New Media Environments

Project Leader

Robert Biddle

Project Co-Leader

Konstantin Beznosov

Researchers

• Robert Biddle (Carleton)
• Bart Simon (Concordia)
• Samuel Trosow (Western)
• Barry Wellman (Toronto)
• Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov (UBC)
• Jacquelyn Burkell (Western)

Theme Distribution

• Theme 1 : 15%
• Theme 2 : 15%
• Theme 4 : 35%
• Theme 5 : 35%

Project Description

New media environments offer complex opportunities for living our lives online, building and leveraging our personal networks. We are invited at every turn to share information about ourselves, and in doing so we communicate rich representations of ourselves and others, and can easily overlook concerns about privacy and security. Much work and commerce is now conducted online, including retail, travel, banking and finance, and for managing both business-employee and government-citizen relationships. Increasingly the environments include social communication and interaction, sharing of information, and play, and involve everyone from children to seniors.

Our project will focus on ways to better support privacy and security by leveraging social science research and exploring new designs and legal perspectives that work with patterns of online behaviour. We will apply principles of "usable" privacy and security which refines human-computer interaction (HCI) principles especially for security needs, and can improves design for privacy and security (Cranor, 2008; Cranor & Garfinkel, 2005; Kerr et al, 2009). We will conduct social science research on "networked individualism" that charts how online behaviour resembles understood social patterns, while taking advantage of the reach and distribution of online worlds. And we will identify, articulate, and inform the legal perspectives on privacy and new media environments, especially the call for "privacy by design".

The overarching idea of this project is to involve all three perspectives in symbiosis: in particular, social science will inform usable design and legal policy scholarship, and they will feed back issues that arise in technology and law. We will consider new media environments for information sharing and discussion (e.g. forums, blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, social networking), media sharing and commentary ( e.g. photo and video sharing), and virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, and social games such as World of Warcraft). We will address both workplace and personal usage, noting that the distinction between the two is becoming less clear as people multiplex their lives online.L. Cranor. A framework for reasonning about the human in the loop. In USENIX Usability, Psychology, and Security (UPSEC), April 2008.

Excellence of the Research

Development of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP)

Our program will be multi-disciplinary, where graduate students in Computer Science, Social Science, and Information Policy Analysis will work together to bring their background knowledge and research results together to inform each others work. CS and Information Policy students will learn that the efficacy of their work must be framed by Social Science, and Social Science students in turn will learn the complexities of designing software and legal frameworks to assist privacy in practice.

Networking and Partnerships

We have two superb partners: the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and Ottawa-based Ramius Corporation, producer of globally used social software. We will hold regular consultations and annual workshops with each, involving researcher from all our disciplines to test their ideas and hear about the priority issues of practice.

Knowledge and Technology Exchange and Exploitation

We expect that our work together will result in: models of behaviour and motivation in new media environments; recommendations for legal and policy frameworks that support privacy by working with models of behaviour, and empirically evaluated computer system prototypes illustrating practical design to support privacy.

References to the Literature

Kerr, Ian, Jennifer Barriger, Jacquelyn Burkell and Katie Black. (2009). "Soft surveillance, hard consent The Law and Psychology of Engineering Consent" in Lessons from the identity trail : anonymity, privacy and identity in a networked society Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, Carole Lucock [eds.] N.Y. Oxford University Press) Available online at http://www.idtrail.org/files/ID%20Trail%20Book/9780195372472_Kerr_01.pdf

L. Cranor and S. Garfinkel. Security and Usability: Designing Systems that People Can Use. OReilly Media, edited collection edition, 2005.

Publications

Presentations

• 2 Minute Madness 2010