Addressing the Address Books’ (Interdependent) Privacy Issues

Abstract 

In recent years, the concept of privacy has evolved, revealing that it is no longer solely within the control of the individual concerned. A particularly noteworthy development is the concept of interdependent privacy—or bystander privacy in the context of ubiquitous technologies—which refers to situations where an individual's privacy is compromised by others. This issue has been explored in various domains, including social networks, location-based services, genomics, and smart homes. In this talk, I will present recent research on the privacy challenges associated with the use of online address books, an area that, surprisingly, has been largely overlooked. Specifically, I will share findings from both legal and user-centered analyses of address book privacy issues. The legal analysis, conducted through the lens of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), consists of a theoretical component examining the roles, rights, and obligations of the different stakeholders, as well as an experimental component involving interactions with service providers. The user-centered analysis focuses on individuals' perceptions of privacy concerns related to address books and on their actual behaviors as users.

This work was done in collaboration with Prof. Mathias Humbert and Prof. Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux (School of Law@UNIL).

Short bio

I am a professor at  UNIL-HEC Lausanne, where I lead the Information Security and Privacy Lab, within the Department of Information Systems. Before I joined UNIL in 2016, I held a tenured researcher position (Chargé de Recherche) at LAAS-CNRS, which I joined in 2015, in the Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance group (TSF). Prior to that, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL, in the Laboratory for Communications and Applications (LCA1) headed by Jean-Pierre Hubaux, from 2011 to 2014, and at McGill University, in the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (DISL) headed by Bettina Kemme, in 2011. During my time at EPFL, I worked for some time at the Nokia Research Center. I earned my PhD degree from the Université of Rennes and Inria in 2010 and my master’s degree in computer science from the Université de Nice — Sophia Antipolis in 2007. During my PhD, I worked in the Large-Scale Dynamic Distributed System Group (ASAP) at IRISA–Inria, under the supervision of Anne-Marie Kermarrec (now at EPFL). I did an internship at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at Telefonica I&D in 2008 and 2009 respectively. I am a former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Cachan – Antenne de Bretagne (now ENS Rennes)