Privacy preservation and auditing for ubiquitous mobile sensing applications and services

Abstract

The recent proliferation of mobile phones, with their many associated sensors, has opened the door to an entirely new range of insights and applications with a host of accompanying privacy concerns. In this thesis, we explore techniques for privacy preservation, transparency, and auditing for mobile sensing applications and services. We demonstrate the feasibility of privacy-conscious defaults with the deployment of an open-source mobile sensing framework and examine the requirements for this as a basis of a forced-transparency system. This system is then examined within the scope of present legal and policy frameworks and assessed for use in both open and closed source mobile sensing platforms and frameworks. Finally, we highlight the use of a mobile application prototyping service as a means for early trend detection for future privacy research.