Consumer Data and Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing

Consumer Data and Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing is a Tesis by Teemu Mutanen published by VTT in 2007.

This is the Thesis Abstract

The emergence of ubiquitous computing means new devices, sensors, and protocols throughout society, and thus new sources of consumer data. The new data sources, along with new means of individual identification, constitute a personal privacy concern: what should and should not be done with personal data. The personal-privacy issue is accompanied by corporate privacy when data mining tasks are applied to consumer databases. The ubiquitous-computing environment will provide various data sources, and these databases will be distributed among various agents.


The privacy-preserving perspective on data mining is a relatively young area. The research in this area is mainly theoretical; to the best of our understanding, no real-world applications exist. In this work, we have tried to fill this gap. The current trend in the growing amount of personalization in online services has also created applications for personalized marketing. Personalized marketing services use detailed information about the context and personal history of a customer. This needs sophisticated individual identification methods, which themselves raise privacy concerns. The novelty in privacy-preserving methods is that sensitive and distributed data could be used for data mining tasks while the privacy of individuals is still preserved.


This thesis has two objectives: the first is to use consumer data from distributed sources and study how customer segmentation is possible while preserving privacy. The idea is to conduct the customer segmentation in a way that the data need not leave the agent holding the data. The other objective is the value of the knowledge acquired from collectively conducted segmentation. We believe that collectively conducted segmentation produces knowledge that cannot be acquired otherwise. The results of this work show that privacy-preserving customer segmentation is possible and that collectively conducted segmentation produces new knowledge.

EU data regulator says Internet addresses are personal information

Article published at Technology Review

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address ''then it has to be regarded as personal data.''

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is -- something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of ''whois'' Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.

Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the time it stored search information to 18 months. It also reduced the time limit on the cookies that collect information on how people use the Internet from a default of 30 years to an automatic expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, said it was ''absurd'' for Google to claim that stripping out the last two figures from the stored IP address made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations.


Full article at Technology Review

Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy - Preserving anonymity in geographically referenced data

First Interdisciplinary Workshop onMobility, Data Mining and PrivacyPreserving anonymity in geographically referenced

Rome, Italy - 14 February 2008

Organized by the European project GeoPKDD Geographic Privacy-aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery (IST-FET project n. 014915).




The technologies of mobile communications and ubiquitous computing pervade our society, and wireless networks sense the movement of people and vehicles, generating large volumes of mobility data. This is a scenario of great opportunities and risks: on one side, mining this data can produce useful knowledge, supporting sustainable mobility and intelligent transportation systems; on the other side, individual privacy is at risk, as the mobility data contain sensitive personal information. A new multidisciplinary research area is emerging at this crossroads of mobility, data mining, and privacy. In this context, the workshop aims at fostering the interdisciplinary dialogue among researchers and professionals in computer science, law, geography, social sciences, statistics, telecommunication and transportation engineering.

Big Brother Fears Return

Source Text Business Week

Ten Likely Events in 2008

Move over, Nostradamus. When it comes to prognostications, we here at BusinessWeek take a backseat to no one—especially when there's zero money on the line.

BusinessWeek writers and editors put our eggnog-addled minds together and envisaged 10 events we're pretty sure will come to pass in the next 12 months

Big Brother Fears Return

For a decade, a Net-happy world has cheerfully shared personal information online, with relatively little mainstream concern over privacy. Now, the issue may come to the fore, as carriers and cable companies deploy click-tracking software and publicity about China's Olympian Internet oversight leaks into the news.