Paper Info
Title
The Wi-Fi privacy ticker: improving awareness & control of personal information exposure on Wi-Fi
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1864349.1864398
UbiComp
Keywords
Field
DocType
unencrypted web traffic,unencrypted transmission,wireless network,personal information exposure,sensitive term,wi-fi privacy ticker,personal information,displays information,wi-fi user,heightened awareness,wi-fi network,field study,control,awareness,privacy
Web traffic,Wireless network,Internet privacy,World Wide Web,Computer science,Software,Personally identifiable information
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
19
1.08
14
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sunny Consolvo14770439.31
Jaeyeon Jung22507172.63
Ben Greenstein3116688.42
Pauline Powledge41093106.07
Gabriel Maganis5988.05
Daniel Avrahami6101676.77