Privacy-Preserving Micro-Interactions for Ubiquitous Devices

Ubiquitous computing devices allow countless micro-interactions over the day - all serving different goals. They leverage sensors, capabilities, and access to personal data to help with these goals. Today's well-established methods to give consent, such as privacy policies, are suitable for long-lasting interactions. However, with these methods, the time to consent might easily exceed the time spent on the interaction, and thus, they are unsuitable for micro-interactions with ubiquitous devices. With this project, we want to investigate the future of micro-interactions that give control to the user to protect their privacy.

You will:

• Perform a literature review
• Gain an understanding of privacy-relevant micro-interactions through expert interviews and a subsequent online survey
• Subsequent analysis of the expert interviews and online survey
• Using the insights of this first step to investigate mitigation measures through interviews and co-design sessions with privacy researchers and UX designers
• Subsequent analysis of the interviews and designs
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need:

• Strong communication skills in english and german
• Good knowledge of qualitative interview studies
• (Optional) knowledge of thematic analysis (for qualitative data)