Source: Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon and Peking Universities have been collaborating to develop a service they are referring to as PrivacyStreams to help app developers and protect the privacy of smartphone users. PrivacyStreams will provide app developers with the data they need for their apps to function, but will not provide access to private information.

For example, an app to monitor sleep behavior would require access to the smartphone's microphone. The app would not need to monitor conversations but may want to monitor noise levels or "loudness." To protect the user's privacy, the software could use the PrivacyStreams' software library to transform microphone feed sampling into loudness and then feed just that information back to the app in the smartphone.

The researchers assume that most app developers do not have malicious intent, but that safeguarding privacy might not be foremost in their minds. "So if the developer wants to do the right thing, how do we help them? By saving them time," said Yurvaj Agarwal, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon's Institute for Software Research.

PrivacyStreams is developing a library of programs to transform data into the required output, without including any personal or private information. For example, a program that relies on location information, such as weather forecasting apps, only needs a city or neighborhood to provide the correct information. The PrivacyStreams program would strip out the exact GPS location information and replace it with a more generic level that satisfies the app's requirements.

If developers adopt the PrivacyStreams concept, it may be used to validate the responsible use of sensitive information by app developers down the road. "While PrivacyStreams is geared to mobile apps, I think we can apply the same idea to the internet of things, or to accessing historical data," said Jason Hong, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.