Privacy-Conscious Personalization

Bell Labs’ has developed software designed to give cell phone users greater control over the disclosure of their location [Selingo 2004].

Preferences could depend on:

who is requesting the location data,
what time of day it is,
or the callers’ activities,
…

Requests for location are then filtered through these preferences, and are permitted or blocked accordingly.

Operators might provide users with a selection of “preference palettes” to start with, the user could then customize their preferences over time.

Slide Notes

Jeffrey Selingo, “Protecting the Cellphone User’s Right to Hide”, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2004, p. E5 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/technology/circuits/05next.html

Transcript

[slide352] The other problem is, what about privacy? Should the other person be able to find out, am I in my office or at home? Right? So there are a lot of questions here about who's requesting the location data, what time it is, what other things can they find out about my activities? Because you can think, if you were a clever thief, right, you would probe and you would see, are they at home? Canceling the call, if they're at home, if they're in the office, hey, it's time to, you know, do the home burglary, or the reverse. Right?