CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar

Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Katie Shilton

Title:  Participating in Privacy: Enabling Disclosure and Discretion in Mobile Sensing

Abstract: Mobile sensing harnesses mobile phone capabilities, such as location awareness, image capture, motion sensitivity, and user input, to create a platform for individual discovery and community exploration. Transforming mobile phones into ubiquitous systems for data capture and analysis poses challenges both technical and social. Among these challenges is empowering users to understand and control their data as they sense and share information at unprecedented granularity and scale.

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, we are developing the Personal Data Stream (PDS) architecture. The architecture positions participants as the central decision-makers in mobile sensing. To enable and encourage participant decisions about data collection and sharing, our project proposes three design principles for the PDS architecture: participant primacy, longitudinal engagement, and legibility of data. Making this architecture successful requires three complementary social structures: vigorous public discussion and debate, transparency of data analysis services, and a legal privilege for raw location data. I demonstrate how the resulting sensing infrastructure can increase personal control over, and engagement with, data using an example of a mobile sensing application, the Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR).

Bio: Katie Shilton is a doctoral student in Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She coordinates a project with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) exploring and responding to privacy and ethical challenges raised by ubiquitous sensing technologies. Before joining CENS, Katie worked on privacy research with faculty in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies. She received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 2003 and a Masters of Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2007. Her work is supported by a grant from the NSF Ethics Education in Science and Engineering program (IIS-0832873).