Abstract Modern mobile devices place a wide variety of sensors and services within the personal space of their users. As a result, these devices are capable of transparently monitoring many sensitive aspects of these users’ lives (e.g., location, health, or correspondences). Users typically trade access to this data for convenient applications and features, in many cases without a full appreciation of the nature and extent of the information that they are exposing to a variety of third parties. Nevertheless, studies show that users remain concerned about their privacy and vendors have similarly been increasing their utilization of privacy-preserving technologies in these devices. Still, despite significant efforts, these technologies continue to fail in fundamental ways, leaving users’ private data exposed. In this work, we survey the numerous components of mobile devices, giving particular attention to those that collect, process, or protect users’ private data. Whereas the individual components have been generally well studied and understood, examining the entire mobile device ecosystem provides significant insights into its overwhelming complexity. The numerous components of this complex ecosystem are frequently built and controlled by different parties with varying interests and incentives. Moreover, most of these parties are unknown to the typical user. The technologies that are employed to protect the users’ privacy typically only do so within a small slice of this ecosystem, abstracting away the greater complexity of the system. Our analysis suggests that this abstracted complexity is the major cause of many privacy-related vulnerabilities, and that a fundamentally new, holistic, approach to privacy is needed going forward. We thus highlight various existing technology gaps and propose several promising research directions for addressing and reducing this complexity.

https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.1515/popets-2016-0018

SoK: Privacy on Mobile Devices – It’s Complicated

The crime of medical identity theft is a growing concern in healthcare institutions A mixed-method study design including a two-stage electronic survey, telephone survey follow-up, and on-site observations was used to evaluate current practices in admitting and registration departments to reduce the occurrence of medical identity theft Survey participants were chief compliance officers in acute healthcare organizations and members of the Health Care Compliance Association Study results indicate variance in whether or how patient identity is confirmed in healthcare settings The findings of this study suggest that information systems need to be designed for more efficient identity management Admitting and registration staff must be trained, and compliance with medical identity theft policies and procedures must be monitored Finally, biometric identity management solutions should be considered for stronger patient identification verification

http://perspectives.ahima.org/PDF/Fall_2009/Exploring_Medical_Identity_Theft/Exploring_Medical_Identity_Theft_final.pdf

Exploring medical identity theft.

Medical Identity theft in the emergency department (ED) can harm numerous individuals, and many frontline healthcare providers are unaware of this growing concern. The two cases described began as typical ED encounters until red flags were discovered upon validating the patient’s identity. Educating all healthcare personnel within and outside the ED regarding the subtle signs of medical identity theft and implementing institutional policies to identify these criminals will discourage further fraudulent behavior.

/pdf/medical-identity-theft-in-the-emergency-department-awareness-2x5mawwkor.pdf

Jennifer O'Brien

Papers

Mitigating medical identity theft.