Mobile fitness tracking apps allow users to track their workouts and share them with friends through online social networks. Although the sharing of personal data is an inherent risk in all social networks, the dangers presented by sharing personal workouts comprised of geospatial and health data may prove especially grave. While fitness apps offer a variety of privacy features, at present it is unclear if these countermeasures are sufficient to thwart a determined attacker, nor is it clear how many of these services’ users are at risk.
In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of privacy behaviors and threats in fitness tracking social networks. Collecting a month-long snapshot of public posts of a popular fitness tracking service (21 million posts, 3 million users), we observe that 16.5% of users make use of Endpoint Privacy Zones (EPZs), which conceal fitness activity near user-designated sensitive locations (e.g., home, office). We go on to develop an attack against EPZs that infers users’ protected locations from the remaining available information in public posts, discovering that 95.1% of moderately active users are at risk of having their protected locations extracted by an attacker. Finally, we consider the efficacy of state-of-the-art privacy mechanisms through adapting geo-indistinguishability techniques as well as developing a novel EPZ fuzzing technique. The affected companies have been notified of the discovered vulnerabilities and at the time of publication have incorporated our proposed countermeasures into their production systems.
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“Something isn’t secure, but I’m not sure how that translates into a problem”: Promoting autonomy by designing for understanding in Signal
Security designs that presume enacting secure behaviors to be beneficial in all circumstances discount the impact of response cost on users’ lives and assume that all data is equally worth protecting. However, this has the effect of reducing user autonomy by diminishing the role personal values and priorities play in the decision-making process. In this study, we demonstrate an alternative approach that emphasizes users’ comprehension over compliance, with the goal of helping users to make more informed decisions regarding their own security. To this end, we conducted a three-phase redesign of the warning notifications surrounding the authentication ceremony in Signal. Our results show how improved comprehension can be achieved while still promoting favorable privacy outcomes among users. Our experience reaffirms existing arguments that users should be empowered to make personal trade-offs between perceived risk and response cost. We also find that system trust is a major factor in users’ interpretation of system determinations of risk, and that properly communicating risk requires an understanding of user perceptions of the larger security ecosystem in whole.
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- PAR ID:
- 10110670
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Fifteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 137-153
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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