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IST Professor’s Dissertation Nominated for Doctoral Dissertation Award
12/11/2006
by Margaret Hopkins
by Margaret Hopkins
The winner will be announced on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at the International Conference on Information Systems in Milwaukee, Wis.
A graduate of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore, Xu studied how consumers’ privacy is affected by location-based services (LBS) offered by telecommunications companies. As part of her research, she developed three theoretical frameworks to address privacy concerns and field tested several mechanisms to protect consumers’ privacy.
“People’s privacy concerns are varied, so you need to have a number of mechanisms for reducing their concerns,” Xu said.
Widely used throughout Asia but less adopted in the United States, location-based services provide individual users with the advantage of being constantly reachable and the capability of accessing network services while on the move. But the geographical positioning technology in LBS also enables telecommunications companies to track consumers’ locations as well as their behaviors such as shopping patterns.
And some consumers may consider that a violation of their privacy.
As part of her research, Xu studied how consumers’ concerns about the security of their personal information can be assuaged with several mechanisms. These include a sense of control over the technology—by turning on the privacy-enhancing features built into mobile devices—and self-regulation by the LBS industry, so that personal data isn’t shared.
While she examined privacy-enhancing mechanisms for location-based services, Xu sees other applications for her work, particularly in e-commerce and healthcare.
