Master's Thesis on Privacy in the Internet of Things: Fostering User Empowerment through Digital Literacy
This repository is a monorepo of the master's thesis, it contains the preparation work of the thesis, the thesis itself and the associated software along with any documentation, read the latest version of the thesis.
Partly inspired by extreme openness, which I first came across on Thang Luong's thesis, and by the free and open source software (FOSS) principles, I started hosting this work here since I first started working on it. Hopefully this will be useful to someone. This repository at least provides transparency to the whole process, as anyone can see every commit made.
Feel free to submit comments or feedback regarding the
application in the Issues
tab.
Internet of Things devices are everywhere, since the birth of ubiquitous computing, human everyday life is expected to contain millions of devices that control every aspect of our lives. Today we have smart vehicles, smart houses, smart cities, wearables among other things that use various types of devices, and various types of networks to communicate. These devices create new ways of collecting and processing personal data from users, and non-users. Most end users are not even aware or have little control over the information that is being collected by these systems. This work takes a holistic approach to this problem by first conducting a literature review to compile current solutions, challenges and future research opportunities. Then conducting a survey to learn more about the general knowledge of individuals about privacy, the Internet of Things and online habits, and finally, based on the information gathered, a mobile application is proposed that gives users information about nearby devices, and how to protect the data that they do not want to share with them. User testing revealed that participants valued having access to more information about privacy related terms. This application is capable of detecting what type of devices are nearby, what kind of data is collected by these devices, and displaying privacy options to the user, when it is possible to do so, with the goal of providing individuals a tool to make informed decisions about their private data.
The application developed for this thesis aims to give users a better
understanding of IoT devices. This application displays information about IoT
devices, like the type of information these devices collect and what privacy
options are available.
Users can add and edit IoT devices.
The application and any documentation related to it, like the software
requirements specification, can be found in
masters-thesis/app.
The application in the masters-thesis/app directory is licensed under a
AGPL-3.0 license, except in masters-thesis/app/docs directory.
All other code in this repository is licensed under the CC-BY-4.0 license.
Copyright © 2023 Nelson Vieira