Personal Information Agent

Full Title or Meme

Support for a personal assistant to help users control access to their personal information.

Context

• Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute assessed the degree of autonomy that people would feel comfortable giving to personalized privacy assistants (PPAs). The team surveyed users on three increasingly autonomous versions of PPAs; most participants reacted positively to the first version, which would simply let users know that devices were around them, while a few said it would make them anxious. A second version that knows users' personal privacy preferences, and makes recommendations from that information, also found wide favor, while the third PPA, which would exclude users from decision-making entirely, provoked mixed reactions. CyLab's Jessica Colnago said, "We found that people are definitely interested in having some sort of assistance like that provided by a PPA, but what that assistance looks like varies across the board. In different scenarios with different people, they want different ways of interacting with the system.”

Problems

• Decentralized IDs were created to give user's control of their identifiers, but at the cost of posting those identifiers on a publicly resolvable public ledger. The result is that any user of the the DID can be correlated with any other use of the same DID. Once sufficient correlations have been accumulated against that DID, the person is uniquely identifiable.

References

Cataegory:Privacy