Identity Exposure

We studied the following issues and their relations:

1. identity information that people think is important to keep private;
2. actions that people claim to take to protect their identities and privacy;
3. privacy concerns;
4. how people expose their identity information in pervasive computing environments;
5. how our RationalExposure model can help minimize unnecessary identity exposure.

We conducted the research in three stages, a comprehensive survey and two in-lab experiments. Our studies show that identity exposure decisions depended on participants’ attitudes about maintaining privacy, but did not depend on participants’ concerns or security actions that they claimed to have taken. Our RationalExposure model did help the participants reduce unnecessary disclosures.

Relevant Publication(s)

1. Feng Zhu, Sandra Carpenter, and Ajinkya Kulkarni, “Understanding Identity Exposure in Pervasive Computing Environments,” Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Vol. 8, 2012.

2. Feng Zhu, Sandra Carpenter, Wei Zhu, Matt W. Mutka, “A Game Theoretic Approach to Optimize Identity Exposure in Pervasive Computing Environments,” International Journal of Information Security and Privacy, Vol. 4, No.4, 2010.

3. Feng Zhu, Wei Zhu, “RationalExposure: a Game Theoretic Approach to Optimize Identity Exposure in Pervasive Computing Environments,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (Percom 2009), March 2009.

4. Feng Zhu, Sandra Carpenter, Ajinkya Kulkarni, Chockalingam Chidambaram, Shruti Pathak, “Understanding and Minimizing Identity Exposure in Ubiquitous Computing Environments”, Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (Mobiquitous 2009).