This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Significant progress has been made on technical solutions for implementing security while preserving varying degrees of privacy for mobile electronic devices. A largely unsolved problem involves knowing what type of technical solutions to implement and under what circumstances. This challenge arises because in actuality there is in general no such thing as a clear "optimal" or "right" solution. One way to view this problem is by focusing on the fact that such devices potentially play an integral role in people's lives and impact important human values: security and privacy of course, but also other values such as autonomy, trust, and physical well-being. Further, these values are often in tension. This project will develop a principled and systematic conceptual framework for analyzing these value implications and tensions in the context of two archetypical examples of future mobile devices: implantable medical devices and mobile phone safety applications. A key component of our approach will be the application and extension of the Value Sensitive Design theory and methodology. Researchers will develop and evaluate new technology, as well as undertake empirical work with a range of stakeholders, including Futures Workshops and semi-structured interviews. Expected outcomes include a framework for analyzing the relationships and trade-offs among privacy, security, autonomy, and other values for mobile devices that accounts for both situational and embodied dimensions of these values; a pallet of key technical solutions to these problems; a set of case studies; and finally design recommendations for use by other researchers and practitioners.
Results of this work will not only develop technical mechanisms for providing the "right" level of security and privacy for new mobile technologies, but can help influence the definition of what "right" means in the context of the broader set of goals and values. In society more generally, there is an increasing use of technologies that are focused upon here: implantable medical devices and highly capable cell phones used for personal safety. Improving human health and personal safety, while not significantly undermining other key values such as privacy, trust, and autonomy, will be important in the development of such technologies. It is anticipated that the ways of analyzing such problems will be applicable to other technologies as well, such as RFID tags on personal possessions, Smart Cards for paying for tolls or transit fares, and many others.
