Social inference risk modeling:In mobile and social applications

Sara Motahari, Sotirios Ziavras, Mor Naaman, Mohamed Ismail, Quentin Jones

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, CSE 2009 - 2009 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, PASSAT 2009
Pages125-132
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event2009 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, PASSAT 2009 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: Aug 29 2009Aug 31 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, CSE 2009
Volume3

Other

Other2009 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, PASSAT 2009
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period8/29/098/31/09

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

Keywords

  • Inference
  • Privacy
  • Ubiquitous social computing

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