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PHIN: A Privacy Protected Heterogeneous IoT Network

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Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 415))

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Abstract

The increasing growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) escalates a broad range of privacy concerns, such as inconsistencies between an IoT application and its privacy policy, or inference of personally identifiable information (PII) of users without their knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose and develop a privacy protection framework called PHIN, for a heterogeneous IoT network, which aims to evaluate privacy risks associated with a new IoT device before it is deployed within a network. We define a methodology and set of metrics to identify and calculate the level of privacy risk of an IoT device and to provide two-layered privacy notices. We also develop a privacy taxonomy and data practice mapping schemas by analyzing 75 randomly selected privacy policies from 12 different categories to help us identify and extract IoT data practices. We conceptually analyze our framework with four smart home IoT devices from four different categories. The result of the evaluation shows the effectiveness of PHIN in helping users understand privacy risks associated with a new IoT device and make an informed decision prior to its installation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The most popular IoT devices: http://iotlineup.com/.

  2. 2.

    The list of analyzed IoT privacy policies: https://tinyurl.com/y3pbhlf8.

  3. 3.

    https://developer.android.com/docs.

  4. 4.

    Policy Phrase and Policy Phrase Categories Schemas: https://tinyurl.com/y5ty2a8d.

  5. 5.

    http://privacygrade.org/third_party_libraries.

  6. 6.

    Sensitive API to Sensitive Data Types Mapping: https://tinyurl.com/y5ty2a8d.

  7. 7.

    GitHub Link: https://www.github.com/vijayantajain/PDroid.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/SKaplanOfficial/Privacy-Crawler.

  9. 9.

    https://www.withings.com/us/en/legal/privacy-policy; https://www.arlo.com/en-us/about/privacy-policy/; https://privacy.dyson.com/en/globalprivacypolicy.aspx; https://anovaculinary.com/privacy/.

  10. 10.

    PHIN’s Evaluation Dataset: https://tinyurl.com/yyu2r58r.

  11. 11.

    https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/.

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Correspondence to Sanonda Datta Gupta .

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Gupta, S.D., Nygaard, A., Kaplan, S., Jain, V., Ghanavati, S. (2021). PHIN: A Privacy Protected Heterogeneous IoT Network. In: Cherfi, S., Perini, A., Nurcan, S. (eds) Research Challenges in Information Science. RCIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 415. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75018-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75018-3_8

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