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Fine-Grained Privacy Control for Fitness and Health Applications Using the Privacy Management Platform

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 977))

Abstract

Due to the Internet of Things, novel types of sensors are integrated into everyday objects. A domain that benefits most is the fitness and health domain. With the advent of the so-called Smartbands—i. e., bracelets or watches with built-in sensors such as heart rate sensors, location sensors, or even glucose meters—novel fitness and health application are made possible. That way a quantified self can be created. Despite all the advantages that such applications entail, new privacy concerns arise.

These applications collect and process sensitive health data. Users are concerned by reports about privacy violations. These violations are enabled by inherent security vulnerabilities and deficiencies in the privacy systems of mobile platforms. As none of the existing privacy approaches is designed for the novel challenges arising from Smartband applications, we discuss, how the Privacy Policy Model (PPM), a fine-grained and modular expandable permission model, can be applied to this application area. This model is implemented in the Privacy Management Platform (PMP). Thus the outcomes of this work can be leveraged directly. Evaluation results underline the benefits of our work for Smartband applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Binder.html.

  2. 2.

    The data type Location is not supported by AIDL. Additional type definitions are required to compile this interface definition.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is part of the PATRON research project which is commissioned by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung gGmbH. The authors would like to thank the BW-Stiftung for the funding of this research.

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Stach, C. (2019). Fine-Grained Privacy Control for Fitness and Health Applications Using the Privacy Management Platform. In: Mori, P., Furnell, S., Camp, O. (eds) Information Systems Security and Privacy. ICISSP 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 977. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25109-3_1

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