DEEProtect protects a user's information by allowing them to control the sensor information collected. Users can specify what data the apps are allowed to access and how that data should be altered, maintaining their privacy while still enabling the apps to function with the necessary information.
Supriyo Chakraborty is a privacy and security researcher at IBM in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. His team devised DEEProtect for people who want more active control over their data. It’s a system that blunts the ability of apps to draw conclusions about user activity from a phone’s sensor data. People could use DEEProtect to specify what their apps would be allowed to do with sensor data. For example, someone may want an app to transcribe speech but not identify the speaker.
DEEProtect intercepts whatever raw sensor data an app tries to access. It then strips those data down to only the features needed to make user-approved inferences.
Consider speech-to-text translation. For this, the phone typically needs sound frequencies and the probabilities of particular words following each other in a sentence. But sound frequencies could also help a spying app deduce a speaker’s identity. So DEEProtect distorts the dataset before releasing it to the app. However, it leaves alone data on word orders. Those data have little or no bearing on a speaker’s identity.
Users get to control how much DEEProtect changes the data. More distortion offers more privacy — but at a price: It degrades app functions. DEEProtect protects a user's information by...
allowing them to control the sensor information collected.
destroying all sensor information after it is used by a user's phone.
alerting them when a suspicious app is collecting sensor information.
making it impossible for a phone to share sensor information.
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