Thoughts on Privacy

12 Jun 2015

An interesting research paper about security vs. privacy. It is about securing the home through "smart" internet connected locks and how it could allow parents to spy on their teenage kids. When the kids circumvent the system in order to regain privacy security is even lower than with a "old-school" solution.

It is relevant to this project because very similar audit logs are produced by the smart key hooks. The information smart key hooks collect is "text-only" which is better accepted by the studies participants than a photo log. The papers authors suggest to reduce the "visibility of the logs":

One way to reduce the visibility of logs is to make the log accessible only on a website (“pull” access), rather than through automatic notification (“push” access)

and:

Another approach to making information less visible without necessarily reducing utility is to present less granular logs. For instance, a teenager who pushes an 11:00 PM curfew would prefer a log that says the teen arived [sic] home “around 11 PM,” as opposed to at “11:13:42 PM.”

That's something worth to consider.