Information privacy

About: Information privacy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25412 publications have been published within this topic receiving 579611 citations. The topic is also known as: data privacy & data protection.

Economic Aspects of Personal Privacy

Abstract: The advent of low-cost technology for manipulating and communicating information has raised significant concerns about personal privacy. Privacy is a complex issue that can be treated from many perspectives; this chapter provides an overview of some of the economic issues surrounding it.

Online information privacy: measuring the cost-benefit trade-off

Abstract: Concern over information privacy is widespread and rising. However, prior research is silent about the value of information privacy and the benefit of privacy protection. We conducted a conjoint analysis to explore individuals’ trade-offs between the benefits and costs of providing personal information to Websites. We find that economic incentives (monetary reward and future convenience) do affect individuals’ preferences over Websites with differing privacy policies. For instance, the disallowance of secondary use of personal information is worth between $39.83 and $49.78. Surprisingly, we find that cost-benefit trade-offs did not vary with personal characteristics including gender, contextual knowledge, individualism, and trust propensity.

A Privacy Model for Smart Metering

Abstract: Electricity suppliers have started replacing traditional electricity meters with so-called smart meters, which can transmit current power consumption levels to the supplier within short intervals. Though this is advantageous for the electricity suppliers' planning purposes, and also allows the customers a more detailed look at their usage behavior, it means a considerable risk for privacy. The detailed information can be used to judge whether persons are in the household, when they come home, which electric devices they use (e.g. when they watch TV), and so forth. In this work, we introduce the "smart metering privacy model" for measuring the degree of privacy that a smart metering application can provide. Moreover, we present two design solutions both with and without involvement of trusted third parties. We show that the solution with trusted party can provide "perfect privacy" under certain conditions.

PACP: An Efficient Pseudonymous Authentication-Based Conditional Privacy Protocol for VANETs

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new privacy preservation scheme, named pseudonymous authentication-based conditional privacy (PACP), which allows vehicles in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) to use pseudonyms instead of their true identity to obtain provably good privacy. In our scheme, vehicles interact with roadside units to help them generate pseudonyms for anonymous communication. In our setup, the pseudonyms are only known to the vehicles but have no other entities in the network. In addition, our scheme provides an efficient revocation mechanism that allows vehicles to be identified and revoked from the network if needed. Thus, we provide conditional privacy to the vehicles in the system, that is, the vehicles will be anonymous in the network until they are revoked, at which point, they cease to be anonymous.

Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization

Abstract: Tor is the most popular volunteer-based anonymity network consisting of over 3000 volunteer-operated relays. Apart from making connections to servers hard to trace to their origin it can also provide receiver privacy for Internet services through a feature called "hidden services". In this paper we expose flaws both in the design and implementation of Tor's hidden services that allow an attacker to measure the popularity of arbitrary hidden services, take down hidden services and deanonymize hidden services. We give a practical evaluation of our techniques by studying: (1) a recent case of a botnet using Tor hidden services for command and control channels; (2) Silk Road, a hidden service used to sell drugs and other contraband; (3) the hidden service of the DuckDuckGo search engine.