Award will fund research on privacy decisions by users of connected household devices

Alfred Kobsa, UCI professor of informatics, is part of an international team that recently received $882,000 from the National Science Foundation and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. The award will fund research to improve users’ privacy decisions within the “Internet of Things,” which is the network connectivity among household items that enable them to collect and exchange data. Kobsa will work with his former student Bart Knijnenburg, now an assistant professor at Clemson University, and Martijn Willemsen of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. They will investigate how, why and when the privacy decisions of household IoT users are suboptimal, then use this research to create and test a simple single-user interface that integrates privacy settings across all household devices. The proposed interface will offer a flexible set of privacy profiles that fit a range of privacy preferences, while also helping U.S. companies comply with European Union privacy regulations when operating in European markets.