How much information about you is on the internet? If you are an avid user of social networking sites such as Facebook, a member of online gaming communities such as World of Warcraft or Travian, or have geo-location apps on your smart phone, the answer is probably more than you realise. EU-funded researchers are developing technology to protect privacy and manage trust in this mobile, context-rich, geo-tagged and social-networked age.
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“Some people might say they’re not worried what information about them is accessible online, that they’ve got nothing to hide, but no one in their right mind wants private information shared on the internet,” says Prof. Kai Rannenberg, the Deutsche Telekom Chair of Mobile Business & Multilateral Security at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
Few people, for example, would want their credit card details published for all the world to see, compromising photos shared with family members or co-workers, or let anyone know their exact location at any given time. However, such information can find its way online and end up in the wrong hands: either because people willingly put it there but erroneously think only certain trusted people can see it, or, increasingly, because applications broadcast such information automatically – a problem particularly true of geo-location apps and location-based social networks on smart phones.
“Many people don’t read the fine print about how the information they share in social networks may be used, they don’t adjust their privacy settings or don’t understand how the settings work, or the community changes its privacy policy or practices in some way,” Prof. Rannenberg notes. But if information technology has created privacy issues, can it not also be used to solve them?
That is the thinking behind the ‘Privacy and Identity Management for Community Services’ PICOS project, a pioneering initiative coordinated by Prof. Rannenberg and his team, involving 11 academic and industrial partners in seven European countries. Supported by €4 million in funding from the European Commission, the PICOS researchers studied ways to use technology to enhance privacy and manage trust in social networks, focusing particularly on people accessing services from mobile devices.
They developed a range of concepts and tools to enable people to protect private and sensitive information while still being able to interact and share the information they want with whom they want.
Designed to be installed on a smart phone, the PICOS application incorporates features for identity management, controlling information flows, sharing files securely, blurring geo-location information, and dynamically and intelligently alerting users to potential privacy issues in their online activities.
The system was designed in close consultation with three potential end-user communities: recreational anglers, online gamers, and self-employed taxi-drivers. Two of those communities – anglers in Austria and Germany and online gamers in Austria and the Czech Republic – also tested the completed platform and the applications on their smartphones in a series of field trials.
“The aim of PICOS is to help people better manage and more clearly understand the information they are sharing and with whom they are sharing it. This is important for all social networks, but especially when location information is involved, something that can be highly sensitive,” Prof. Rannenberg explains.
Users can, for example, use the platform to create partial identities for different purposes, using a more complete profile for interactions with trusted friends in an online social network, while showing much less information about themselves to acquaintances, other community members or the public. Similarly, they can control information flows into the community or sub-groups of the community, and easily manage which files they want to share and with whom.
“The concepts we defined in PICOS could apply anywhere to anyone who shares information online, from taxi drivers to business people,” Prof. Rannenberg adds. “As more and more people join online communities and society becomes more knowledge-focused, ensuring trust and privacy will become ever more important.”
Members of the PICOS consortium are continuing research in the field in an effort to ensure a sustainable impact from their work.
For instance, one German SME partner, IT-Objects, has already developed an Android version of the PICOS application to be used for commercial and leisure applications.
PICOS received research funding under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
www.picos-project.eu