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The Wi-Fi privacy ticker: improving awareness & control of personal information exposure on Wi-Fi

Published: 26 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Anyone within range of an 802.11 wireless network ("Wi-Fi") can use free software to collect the unencrypted web traffic of others on the network. However, many Wi-Fi users are completely unaware of the risk that this creates. This work aims to improve users' awareness about what they expose to others on Wi-Fi networks and provide them with some control. Our system, the Wi-Fi Privacy Ticker, displays information about the exposure of sensitive terms that are sent to and from a user's computer and prevents the unencrypted transmission of terms from the user's computer that she has identified as highly sensitive. In a three-week field study with 17 participants, we found that the Wi-Fi Privacy Ticker improved participants' awareness of the circumstances in which their personal information is transmitted. We show that this heightened awareness contributed to changes in their behavior while on Wi-Fi.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      UbiComp '10: Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing
      September 2010
      366 pages
      ISBN:9781605588438
      DOI:10.1145/1864349
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 26 September 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. awareness
      2. control
      3. data exposure
      4. data leaks
      5. peripheral displays
      6. privacy
      7. ticker
      8. wi-fi
      9. wireless network

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      • Research-article

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      Ubicomp '10
      Ubicomp '10: The 2010 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
      September 26 - 29, 2010
      Copenhagen, Denmark

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      UbiComp '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 202 submissions, 19%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

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      • (2023)Blind-trust: Raising awareness of the dangers of using unsecured public Wi-Fi networksComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2023.07.011209(359-367)Online publication date: Sep-2023
      • (2022)A Taxonomy of Privacy, Trust, and Security Breach Incidents of Internet-of-Things Linked to F(M).A.A.N.G. Corporations2022 IEEE World AI IoT Congress (AIIoT)10.1109/AIIoT54504.2022.9817225(591-596)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2022
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      • (2020)Security and Privacy in Big Data Life Cycle: A Survey and Open ChallengesSustainability10.3390/su12241057112:24(10571)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2020
      • (2020)EAP-SH: An EAP Authentication Protocol to Integrate Captive Portals in the 802.1X Security ArchitectureWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-020-07298-yOnline publication date: 22-Apr-2020
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      • (2019)Effects of Privacy Notification Style and Frequency on Phone UsageJournal of Computer Information Systems10.1080/08874417.2018.156300861:1(30-41)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2019
      • (2017)End user security & privacy concerns with smart homesProceedings of the Thirteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3235924.3235931(65-80)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2017
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