Research

In the last decade, more and more devices (such as mobile phones, smart meters, or RFID cards) have been designed and deployed in order to collect rich information about users and their environment. While primarily targeting to offer tailored services and innovative applications, such data collection inherently also represents a danger to user privacy. Often, sensitive information can be inferred from the data easily, such as users’ whereabouts or fine-grained activity information.

In the context of this application domain, our research is primarily focused on the following points:

1. Exploring threats to privacy
2. Increasing the users’ awareness of these threats
3. Developing countermeasures to preserve user privacy
4. Understanding the factors that motivate users to reveal sensitive information
5. Empowering users to protect their privacy by providing innovative and usable methods

Our general research interests are privacy, anonymity and pseudonymity, trust and reputation, and usability in computer networks.