Preserving User Privacy and Security in Context-Aware Mobile Platforms

Contemporary smartphones are capable of generating and transmitting large amounts of data about their users. Recent advances in collaborative context modeling combined with a lack of adequate permission model for handling dynamic context sharing on mobile platforms have led to the emergence of a new class of mobile applications that can access and share embedded sensor and context data. Most of the time such data is used for providing tailored services to the user but it can lead to serious breaches of privacy. We use Semantic Web technologies to create a rich notion of context. We also discuss challenges for context aware mobile platforms and present approaches to manage data flow on these devices using semantically rich fine-grained context-based policies that allow users to define their privacy and security need using tools we provide.

Progressive Scrambling for Social Media

Despite research work achieving progress in preserving the privacy of user profiles and visual surveillance, correcting problems in social media have not taken a great step. The reason is the lack of effective modelling, computational algorithms, and resultant evaluations in quantitative research. In this article, the authors take social media into consideration and link users together under the umbrella of social networks so as to exploit a way that the potential problems related to media privacy could be solved. The author's contributions are to propose tensor product-based progressive scrambling approaches for privacy preservation of social media and apply our approaches to the given social media which may encapsulate privacy before being viewed so as to achieve the goal of privacy preservation in anonymity, diverse and closeness. These approaches fully preserve the media information of the scrambled image and make sure it is able to be restored. The results show the proposed privacy persevering approaches are effective and have outstanding performance in media privacy preservation.

Volunteered Surveillance

As the front end of the digitized commercial world, corporations, marketers, and advertisers are under the spotlight for taking advantage of some part of the big data provided by consumers via their digital presence and digital advertising. Now, collectors and users of that data have escalated the level of their asymmetric power with scope and depth of the instant and historical data on consumers. Since consumers have lost the ownership (control) over their own data, their reaction ranges from complete opposition to voluntary submission. This chapter investigates psychological and societal reasons for this variety in consumer behavior and proposes that a contractual solution could promote a beneficial end to all parties through transparency and mutual power.

Ethics and Social Networking

Thanks to recent technological advancements, social networking has seen unprecedented growth. Services such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have evolved from niche communities to active cyber-societies. In addition to an increase in the diffusion of social media, there has also been an increase in the amount and type of information that participants share in these online environments. In this paper, the authors integrate decision making research from three disciplines -marketing, theology and information systems - to explain information disclosure in online communities. They use these disciplines to provide a comprehensive review of existing literature and present innovative recommendations for research and practice. In particular, the authors recommend Potter's Box as a useful framework for evaluating the ethical implications of online information disclosure.

Panopticon – Cybercontrol in Liquid Modernity

The chapter proposes a critical analysis of the panopticon, the model of an ideal prison devised in the 18th century by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and its function in modern management. The original prison was designed in such a way that it enabled a single prison guard to watch all the inmates at all times, while the latter could never tell whether they were currently being watched or not. The idea behind the panopticon gave rise to the concept of panopticism, a philosophy developed by the French thinker Michel Foucault, which he voiced in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975/1995). Analyzing the mechanism of control through the ages, he ponders the resilience and adaptability of such concepts as discipline, training and hierarchical surveillance. I intend to provide a critical analysis of methods and techniques of organizational control applied today, in the era of liquid modernity. Since that control, more often than not, is executed nowadays by electronic surveillance equipment and computer programs, hence my term of choice – “cybercontrol”.

A Usability Evaluation of Facebook's Privacy Features Based on the Perspectives of Experts and Users

The issue of privacy in social networks is a hot topic today, because of the growing amount of information shared among users, who are connected to social media every moment and by different devices and displays. This chapter presents a usability evaluation of the privacy features of Facebook's social network. The authors carry out an evaluation composed by three approaches, executed in three stages: first by the analysis and inspection of system's features related to privacy, available for both systems (Web-based systems and mobile-based systems, e.g. app). The second step is a heuristic evaluation led by three experts, and finally, the third step is a questionnaire with 605 users to compare the results between specialists and real users. This chapter aims to present the problems associated with these privacy settings, and it also wants to contribute for improving the user interaction with this social network.

Digital Democracy in Authoritarian Russia

Digital media is expected to promote political participation in government. Around the world, from the United States to Europe, governments have been implementing e-government (use of of the Internet to make bureaucracy more efficient) and promising e-democracy (increased political participation by citizens). Does digital media enable citizens to participate more easily in government, or can authoritarian governments interfere with citizens' ability to speak freely and obtain information? This study of digital media in Russia will show that while digital media can be used by Russian citizens to gain information and express opinions, Kremlin ownership of print media, along with censorship laws and Internet surveillance, can stifle the growth of digital democracy. Though digital media appears to hold promise for increasing citizen participation, this study will show that greater consideration needs to be given to the power of authoritarian governments to suppress civic discourse on the Internet.

Smartphone Guns Shooting Tweets

This chapter investigates the increasing use of social media during a 2012 flare up in armed conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel. Through tweet and counter tweet, Israel, Hamas, and digital recruits engage in a duel as lethal to identity as kinetic projectiles. Internet connected devices such as smartphones have become hostile agents through the republishing of social media content. Such devices and social media content have material affects beyond the geographic battlespace. The advent of Internet connected devices and social media content concomitant with their use during armed conflict by hostiles beyond the geographic battlespace suggest that patterns of conflict are rapidly changing calling into question the notion of hostile, hostile acts, and battlespace. In a social media and smartphone saturated era, who and what counts as hostile (people, smartphones, and tweets) is increasingly ambiguous.

Persuasion and Propaganda in War and Terrorism

This chapter focuses on the use of propaganda during times of war, prejudice, and political unrest. Part one distinguishes between persuasion and one of its forms, propaganda. The meaning-in-use of the term ‘propaganda' is essential to understanding its use over time. Part two presents relevant examples of propaganda from the past several centuries in the United States and Europe. These examples include episodes from World War I and II, among others. Propaganda is not a new tool of persuasion, and learning about its use in the past provides a comparison that helps in understanding its use in the present and future. Part three looks at recent examples of how propaganda occurs in actual use in online terrorist mediums by Al-Qaeda and by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Collective Event Detection by a Distributed Low-Cost Smart Camera Network

The current surveillance systems must identify the continuous human behaviors to detect various events from video streams. To enhance the performance of event recognition, in this chapter, we propose a distributed low-cost smart cameras system, together with a machine learning technique to detect abnormal events through analyzing the sequential behaviors of a group of people. Our system mainly includes a simple but efficient strategy to organize the behavior sequence, a new indirect encoding scheme to represent a group of people with relatively few features, and a multi-camera collaboration strategy to perform collective decision making for event recognition. Experiments have been conducted and the results confirm the reliability and stability of the proposed system in event recognition.