On the elicitation of privacy and ethics preferences of mobile users

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile users are constantly being connected and increasingly asked to express their personal preferences in the digital world. User preferences deal with simple device settings options, like notification alarms, as well as relevant ethical choices relating to the user behavior, privacy ones included (e.g., concerning the unauthorized disclosure and mining of personal data, as well as the access to restricted resources). All these preferences define the user, they are the building blocks of her digital identity and will be increasingly important given the growing rise of autonomous technologies and their ethical implications. The settings that enable these preferences are often hard to locate and hard to understand, even in popular apps and operating systems. Moreover, they can expose privacy, be employed for profiling or exploited for malicious activities. In this landscape, we devise the introduction of a Personal Preferences Automation Module (PPAM) capable of automatically inferring, applying and enforcing user choices in multiple scenarios ranging from speeding up simple time consuming tasks, to managing sensitive ethical choices. The wide range of sensors and devices that can be found in the mobile domain makes it a privileged context in which to employ the proposed module. In this paper, we present two application scenarios and describe the proposed approach at work on them.

Exosoul: Ethical Profiling in the Digital World

“…a software shield that protects them and their personal data through the mediation of all interactions with the digital world that would result in unacceptable or morally wrong behaviors according to their ethical and privacy preferences. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature [61,20], but aiming at reflecting general moral preferences and predicting user's digital behaviors accordingly like proposed in [41]. More precisely, EXOSOUL is based on the notion of digital ethics [23] and its separation in soft ethics to reflect user's ethics and hard ethics to define the ethical values a digital system shall comply with.…”

Exosoul: ethical profiling in the digital world

“…a software shield that protects them and their personal data through the mediation of all interactions with the digital world that would result in unacceptable or morally wrong behaviors according to their ethical and privacy preferences. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature [60,20], but aiming at reflecting general moral preferences and predicting user's digital behaviors accordingly like proposed in [40]. More precisely, EXOSOUL is based on the notion of digital ethics [23] and its separation in soft ethics to reflect user's ethics and hard ethics to define the ethical values a digital system shall comply with.…”

Software Engineering and Formal Methods

“…From the case of privacy preferences in the app domain [12] to the more complex case of autonomous driving cars [4] the average user is unprotected and inadeguate in her interaction with the digital world. In the talk I will present the approach and preliminary results undertaken in the project EXOSOUL [2,[8][9][10][11] that stands on the side of users. EXOSOUL aims at equipping humans with an automatically generated exoskeleton, a software shield that protects and empowers them and their personal data in all interactions with the digital world by mediating or discarding those ones that would result in unacceptable or morally wrong behaviors according to the user's ethical and privacy preferences [3].…”