Geolocation Privacy and Application Platforms

摘要

Security and privacy issues for Location-Based Services (LBS) and geolocation-capable applications often revolve around designing a User Interface (UI) such that users are informed about what an application is doing and have the ability to accept or decline. However, in a world where applications increasingly draw on a wide variety of LBS providers on the back-end, and where more and more applications are using small-screen or even screenless devices, UI-centered views of designing security and privacy are no longer sufficient. In this position paper, we describe the increasingly varied landscape of platforms that users face today and the privacy issues of each. We argue for a service-oriented approach, so that security and privacy issues are described and negotiated in a machine-readable way, and can thus be adapted to new platforms and UIs more easily. While User Experience (UX) is important, we believe it should be derived from a service-oriented view, instead of being designed for each platform individually.