| Businesses and organizations such as retail stores, airports, and hospitals have begun to leverage the recent advances in localization technology to provide quality location-based services to their customers. Beacons are one example of this technology, which use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals to broadcast a unique identifier that is detected by a compatible device to determine the location of nearby users. Beacons can be used to provide a tailored user experience with each encounter, yet can also constitute an invasion of privacy, due to their covertness and ability to track user behavior. This is coupled with their potential for targeted advertising, and a lack of available information regarding their usage, degree of threat, and control. Therefore, I hypothesize that user-driven privacy policy configuration is key to enabling effective and trustworthy privacy management during beacon encounters. To accomplish this goal, I first investigate users' awareness and perceptions of beacons. I identify the privacy concerns users have, the related information they are willing to share, and the challenges they experience regarding the context of beacon encounters. I then demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of a crowdsourcing-based approach to deriving context-based beacon categorization and privacy labels. Lastly, I develop a framework for beacon privacy management that provides a policy configuration platform. Through evaluation of a proof-of-concept, I test different configuration schemes to refine the framework and offer recommendations for future research. |
