Paper Reading #17 : Privacy Risks Emerging from the Adoption of Innocuous Wearable Sensors in the Mobile Environment

Authors
Andrew Raij, Santosh Kumar, Animikh Ghosh, and Mani Srivastava 


Occupation

• Andrew Raij is a Post-Doc Fellow in the Wireless Sensors and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Lab at the University of Memphis.
• Santosh Kumar is currently an associate professor at the University of Memphis and leads the WiSe MANet Lab.
• Animikh Ghosh is currently a Junior Research Associate at Infosys Labs in India and spent time as a researcher in the WiSeMANet Lab at the University of Memphis.
• Mani Srivastava is currently a professor in the Electrical Engineering Dept. and Computer Science Dept. at UCLA. 

Location

Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

Summary
Hypothesis

The authors believe that there is an increased concern for potentially private behaviors being exposed and accessible due to the popularization of sensor based applications.

Methods
The researchers would put the participants in two separate groups. One group acted as the control group as they were not monitored while the other group were monitored for several days and have basic information recorded about them. Both groups did a survey to indicate his/her thoughts on potentially private behavior. Of the two groups only the second group were shown the results of the observation and based on this a conclusion was drawn out. In the end the participants were to fill out another survey based on his/her experience of this experiment

Result
The data collected shows the lack of concern when private data was related indirectly or to third parties. It was also shown that the monitored group had more caution and level of concern even after the observation period was over. The other group showed minimal change however. It was also noted that the perception the participants had on who would potentially see this private data had a noticeable impact on how the participants acted. There was a general concern on the data being shown to a large number of people or to the public. In the end, areas involving stress and conversation periods tended to make people most vulnerable.

Content
The authors did an experiment to see how concerned the people are when it comes to exposing private information. It was also an experiment to see privacy awareness by the people and the reaction given by the people based on the information they might be providing through basic sensors.

Discussion
I personally was a bit disappointed with this paper since there was no actual product they wanted to try out. But i personally think that it was still a interesting idea that most people probably haven't thought about. I believe that ideas like this can help provide more elements to individual's privacy protection in the future.