Enhancing Privacy in Mobile Collaborative Applications By Enabling End-User Tailoring Of The Distributed Architecture

Abstract Nowadays, supporting social interaction and multi-user requirements with mobile applications becomes indispensable. Thereby, security and privacy are of major concern due to the frequent scandals related to misusage of end-users data or various threats such as different kinds of man-in-the-middle attacks based on inferring interaction traces. Preserving the end-users’ privacy, especially in mobile collaborative settings, is the most often-cited point of critique of mobile and ubiquitous computing. In this paper we present an approach empowering end-users to tailor (adapt) their mobile applications according to their privacy needs by adjusting the distributed architecture decentralisation degree also at runtime (e.g. switching among various data storage and communication servers without leaving the main social setting context). Thereby we consider other requirements such as usability and awareness. The gathering of requirements is based on lab and user trials as well as derived from accumulated experiences from various projects. We show this exemplary with the help of a prototypic mobile application to support an angling community with privacy and collaboration needs related to location-based services.