How SoSporty has dealt with Privacy issues:

Referring to the previous post about different privacy issues associated with LBS. here what our application aims to do.

• Controlling how much and what activities can the user sees cooperate with his convenience and availability around him/her. But it is also an option according to if the user enables the positioning function or not.
• Gaining the trust is by adding the user another person as a friend, then it will allow him/her to see if he/she has joined a certain sports activity or not.
• For tracking others, that is not possible in our application we only allow tagging sports activities. And people who would love to join these activities are only tagged by their nicknames for only their friends and under their consent. Users are kept anonymous to each other if they are not added to each other friend list. Even if they have ticked attending to a sports activity they are kept anonymous only their position and place appear is to be taken. Furthermore, they are given random names and numbers each time they enter the chat room unless they are friends.
• For Security we used inception system for the sensitive personal information and also our database is designed to secure users information as mentioned in the post of the data storage in our social application.

Location-based technology services:

This is a very popular service based on different navigation technologies. LBS is a wireless service that determines the location information of the information device user by using Geographical Information System (GIS) and other satellite navigation platform.

Location Based Services (LBS) is now used in all kinds of activities to offer positioning service for different applications.

For example, if you are in an unknown place and want to know anything about the nearest specific service when you inform your application by your mobile then the app compares your location and the desired place stored in the database and guide you to the nearest one by just pinning it on the map. The increase in the number of applications which use LBS is generating healthy competition that is later modified as profit for consumer, operator and corporate sector. LBS is just making life simpler and its use smoother for mobile phone users.

The basic components of LBS are Mobile Device, Communication Network, Positioning Components (GPS, tracking software) and a Mobile Service Provider. LBS is designed to provide valuable information to users based on location or position.

Whether it’s used as a commercial or personal purpose it provides security to individuals as a whole. But the most important issue is privacy and individual autonomy. Though to a large extent, it ensures control over one’s own activities but any technological failure may bring the issue of safety risk. In a large perspective, location-based services have really created a revolution in the communication field and making our day-to-day lives simpler and smoother.

various privacy issues associated with LBS.

as LBS system deals with confidential personal information like location, personal mobile number, and address, it becomes vital to offer security for maintaining user’s privacy.

LBS with the innovation of positioning services having excellent ability to locate the position of users have both pros and cons. It has a large implication on society and economy as tracking device but the information of users can be misused raising issues of personal privacy and national security. As LBS is present and used all around the world with interoperability it becomes necessary to deal with all privacy and security issues.

• Control (Legal) –GPS and LBS devices are used to control and offer various types of services to the user. it controls one’s own direction of moving in guiding the right way.
• Trust (Social) – In social life trust is an essential part of relationships. However, the use of LBS is being practiced in low trust conditions. Monitoring someone with tracking system affects personal relationships.
• Privacy (Ethical) – everyone has the right to privacy or being free disturbances in one’s personal life. But in case of LBS technologies, it becomes essential to provide adequate security to these kinds of data for not being misused by any unauthorized person. Tracking and monitoring someone without his/her consent is purely unethical so needs a high level of security.
• Security (Technological) – to maintain privacy, security systems should be strong. LBS has cons by locating accurate personal information data. but another problem is raised to individuals by providing a bad weak security system to that highly sensitive information stored in its database.

Reference:

http://roseindia.net/technology/LBS/security-and-privacy-issues-lbs.shtml

All users in SoSporty are made aware and acknowledged on how their data is used and what they are used for. We are being transparent about our privacy policies, so when a user signs up to SoSporty they have to acknowledge that they read the privacy policy and that they agree with it. We provide our privacy policy and then list the important statements that the users should agree about as a list of bulletins points they have to tick each one to assure that those who are less interested to read the whole document can have a quick look and tick the box in acknowledging our privacy policy.

we use encryption for our users personal data, through Public Key Encryption systems.

SoSporty Users are taking control over their personal data. In user’s account, they choose  to enable displaying their name, age, email and a their personal photo. Allowing the user to determine what information they would like to share online with their friends other than their nicknames. These options remain in their setting page so that they can change it anytime they want. And of course, when adding a friend the user is reminded to check these options again in addition to sharing photos and videos and having a private live chat with them. Other private personal data that they do not like to share is kept encrypted, safe and unshared with any unauthorized entity.

We will remind users that we use location-based data when they click on the map view, through a popup displayed across the top of the screen. This pop up will point users to their system preferences, where they can change their location based data settings.

Getting the Ethical Approve for The Survey

Conducting a survey means that we need to have an ethical approve since we are sampling people, so we need to apply for ERGO. ERGO is the University of Southampton system that checks your Ethics and Research Governance complies with University policy. We haven’t had any experience in that and never used the system before. We discovered that we needed to complete many documents and forms, – and with the help of  the FPSE instructions and guidelines, we figured that we need to produce 4 documents,  templates for each document is found through the ERGO site https://ergo2.soton.ac.uk/

• The Application Form: It requested the detailed information about the project
• The Participant Information: what will tell participants: about what the study is about, why we do it, what will happen if they participate, how we deal with their data, and who to contact when anything goes wrong.
• Consent information: participants need to consent to the study, We put an online version of the form at the beginning of our survey.
• Survey: This is the questionnaire itself that we designed and the participant will complete. ours is online, so in the application, we provided both screenshots of the survey along with an access to the survey.

Results of Our ERGO Submission

We submitted our request on 20/03/2018.but, unfortunately, we didn’t get the approval until the time that we wrote the post. It stands with our supervisor.

The topic of privacy issue in online social networks (OSNs) never stops. The other day, Facebook suffered “week of shame” and is still suffering the blame from the public. This is the news about Facebook: Facebook’s week of shame: the Cambridge Analytica fallout.

We can never separate privacy from OSNs because as long as people need to socialize, personal information would always be given to OSNs. This is a very critical and difficult fact. The key point is what kind of information should be accessed by social media. Here is a journal about privacy in OSNs which is quite relevant: PRIVACY IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS.