Sensor tricorder: what does that sensor know about me?

Abstract

As rich sensing applications become pervasive, people increasingly find themselves with limited ability to determine what sensor data the applications are collecting about them and how the applications are using the sensor data. Openness and transparency serve as our guiding principles in designing the Sensor Tricorder, a system that enables people to query third party sensors with their smartphones in order to learn about the data collection activities and privacy policies of the applications using the sensors. We leverage the increasing ubiquity of QR Codes in mobile applications and utilize them in a novel way. Our prototype system uses active QR Codes to visually communicate dynamic data such as the sensor activities and application privacy policies to smartphone users. Based on our experiences in building this prototype, we identify the key properties that sensor platforms must provide to support transparency and openness and highlight the main challenges involved in realizing these properties.