A Holistic Framework for Enhancing Privacy Awareness

Home users face increasingly higher risks of privacy loss and struggle with the difficult task of protecting large volumes of personal information. Most privacy research assumes that users have uniform privacy requirements. The main problem with this approach is that research has also shown that users have different privacy attitudes and expectations based upon a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) gender, age and education level. Privacy therefore can mean different things in different contexts, to different people at different times. For example, some uses are less concerned regarding the sharing and use of their location information while others will be very concerned. Therefore, it is important to factor these requirements in to a privacy-awareness model that can enhance user’s awareness and make more informed decisions to reduce their specific degree of exposure. The quantity and range of sensitive information also requires approaches that give users back the control over their data. Therefore, prioritization of privacy-related information based on an individual user basis should be utilised to ensure relevant and timely notification about privacy-related information that is important to the user. This paper presents a critical analysis of the current state of the art and proposes a novel mobile-based architecture to provide users with effective and usable privacy protection.