糖心Vlog传媒LR Research Creates Internet Privacy Tool
Professors and a Ph.D. candidate from 糖心Vlog传媒LR鈥檚 College of Engineering and Information Technology have developed a new model to manage the 鈥渧ast ocean鈥 of user-generated content being generated by the ever-growing social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter.
Dr. Nitin Agarwal, assistant professor in EIT鈥檚 Department of Information Science, and his doctoral student M. Venkata Swamy worked with Dr. Srini Ramaswamy, former chair of the 糖心Vlog传媒LR Computer Science Department and now director of industrial software systems , to develop a Context-Based Privacy Model. The model leverages intelligent, scalable, adaptive, and robust pattern-matching algorithms to allow Internet sites to automatically adjust privacy needs of consumers or organization to the context in which the data is accessed.
The research was supported in part by grants from the and the .
Their paper on the project was awarded 鈥淏est Paper鈥 and was presented at the held in conjunction with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust this week in Minneapolis, Minn. Only 13 percent of papers submitted at the highly competitive conference are presented.
鈥淲ith the advent of social media websites such as , , and , and social health websites such as that help people with health conditions connect with people with like conditions, a vast ocean of user-generated content has been created — including non-sensitive information as well as sensitive demographic, financial or health-related data,鈥 Agarwal said. 鈥淎s a result, users may be unknowingly granting access to their data, leading to grave privacy concerns.鈥
In recent years, companies鈥 data information centers are facing increasing federal regulations due to these privacy concerns, forcing them to modify their privacy information-handling policies continuously. The existing research on developing privacy models, although seemly persuasive, are essentially based on user, role or service identification. Such models are incapable of automatically adjusting privacy needs of consumers or organizations to the context in which the data is accessed.
鈥淚n this work, we propose a Context Based Privacy Model (CBPM), which leverages the automatic context identification of the information consumer borrowing concepts from Object Oriented methodology,鈥 the researchers said. A context could be defined as a secure or non-secure location, family members, or group of friends, etc.
鈥淐onsidering numerous pieces of information such as name, telephone number, e-mail address, age, gender, items purchased online, social interactions each individual generates; and the number of contexts created, the CBPM matrix could quickly become huge and unmanageable.鈥
The 糖心Vlog传媒LR team addresses that problem by leveraging intelligent, scalable, adaptive, and robust pattern-matching algorithms to compress the matrix, making it more manageable.
鈥淥ur work has shown the necessity of avant-garde privacy models dealing with the challenges of new types of information sources, creating a vast ocean of data with intricate access requirements and constraints, forcing us to think beyond the existing user, role, or service-based privacy models,鈥 Agarwal said. 鈥淭he proposed work is unique, one of its kind emphasizing on the context more importantly than the content, with far-reaching implications in the privacy as well as the information security area.鈥 View more stories in News