An official website of the United States government
Open data sets that contain personal information are susceptible to adversarial attacks even when anonymized. By performing low-cost joins on multiple datasets with shared attributes, malicious users of open data portals might get access to information that violates individuals’ privacy. However, open data sets are primarily published using a release-and-forget model, whereby data owners and custodians have little to no cognizance of these privacy risks. We address this critical gap by developing a visual analytic solution that enables data defenders to gain awareness about the disclosure risks in local, joinable data neighborhoods. The solution is derived through a design study with data privacy researchers, where we initially play the role of a red team and engage in an ethical data hacking exercise based on privacy attack scenarios. We use this problem and domain characterization to develop a set of visual analytic interventions as a defense mechanism and realize them in PRIVEE, a visual risk inspection workflow that acts as a proactive monitor for data defenders. PRIVEE uses a combination of risk scores and associated interactive visualizations to let data defenders explore vulnerable joins and interpret risks at multiple levels of data granularity. We demonstrate how PRIVEE can help emulate the attack strategies and diagnose disclosure risks through two case studies with data privacy experts.
more »
« less
Defogger: A Visual Analysis Approach for Data Exploration of Sensitive Data Protected by Differential Privacy
Differential privacy ensures the security of individual privacy but poses challenges to data exploration processes because the limited privacy budget incapacitates the flexibility of exploration and the noisy feedback of data requests leads to confusing uncertainty. In this study, we take the lead in describing corresponding exploration scenarios, including underlying requirements and available exploration strategies. To facilitate practical applications, we propose a visual analysis approach to the formulation of exploration strategies. Our approach applies a reinforcement learning model to provide diverse suggestions for exploration strategies according to the exploration intent of users. A novel visual design for representing uncertainty in correlation patterns is integrated into our prototype system to support the proposed approach. Finally, we implemented a user study and two case studies. The results of these studies verified that our approach can help develop strategies that satisfy the exploration intent of users.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10552817
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
- ISSN:
- 1077-2626
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 11
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Recent studies have shown that users of visual analytics tools can have difficulty distinguishing robust findings in the data from statistical noise, but the true extent of this problem is likely dependent on both the incentive structure motivating their decisions, and the ways that uncertainty and variability are (or are not) represented in visualisations. In this work, we perform a crowd-sourced study measuring decision-making quality in visual analytics, testing both an explicit structure of incentives designed to reward cautious decision-making as well as a variety of designs for communicating uncertainty. We find that, while participants are unable to perfectly control for false discoveries as well as idealised statistical models such as the Benjamini-Hochberg, certain forms of uncertainty visualisations can improve the quality of participants’ decisions and lead to fewer false discoveries than not correcting for multiple comparisons. We conclude with a call for researchers to further explore visual analytics decision quality under different decision-making contexts, and for designers to directly present uncertainty and reliability information to users of visual analytics tools. The supplementary materials are available at: https://osf.io/xtsfz/.more » « less
-
Privacy policies are crucial for informing users about data practices, yet their length and complexity often deter users from reading them. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to identify and visualize data practices within privacy policies at different levels of detail. Leveraging crowd-sourced annotations from the ToS;DR platform, we experiment with various methods to match policy excerpts with predefined data practice descriptions. We further conduct a case study to evaluate our approach on a real-world policy, demonstrating its effectiveness in simplifying complex policies. Experiments show that our approach accurately matches data practice descriptions with policy excerpts, facilitating the presentation of simplified privacy information to users.more » « less
-
As concern over data privacy and existing privacy regulations grows, legal scholars have proposed alternative models for data privacy. This work explores the impact of one such model---the data fiduciary model, which would stipulate that data processors must use personal information only in ways that reflect the best interest of the data subject---through a pair of user studies. We first conduct an interview study with nine mobile app developers in which we explore whether, how, and why these developers believe their current data practices are consistent with the best interest of their users. We then conduct an online study with 390 users in which we survey participants about whether they consider the same data practices to be in their own best interests. We also ask both developers and users about their attitudes towards and their predictions about the impact of a data fiduciary law, and we conclude with recommendations about such an approach to future privacy regulations.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)To account for privacy perceptions and preferences in user models and develop personalized privacy systems, we need to understand how users make privacy decisions in various contexts. Existing studies of privacy perceptions and behavior focus on overall tendencies toward privacy, but few have examined the context-specific factors in privacy decision making. We conducted a survey on Mechanical Turk (N=401) based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to measure the way users’ perceptions of privacy factors and intent to disclose information are affected by three situational factors embodied hypothetical scenarios: information type, recipients’ role, and trust source. Results showed a positive relationship between subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, and between each of these and situational privacy attitude; all three constructs are significantly positively associated with intent to disclose. These findings also suggest that, situational factors predict participants’ privacy decisions through their influence on the TPB constructs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456304
