New smartphone app can manage your privacy preferences - Artificial Intelligence Online

Researchers are developing a personalised privacy assistant app that can simplify the task of setting permissions for your smartphone applications. That is a job that requires well over a hundred decisions, an unmanageable number for the typical user, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US said. The privacy assistant can learn the user's preferences and quickly recommend the most appropriate settings, such as with which app to share the user's location, or contact list. In the field test, people accepted almost 80 per cent of the recommendations made by the privacy assistant and, at the end of the study, these people indicated they were more comfortable with their privacy settings than users who did not have a privacy assistant, researchers said. "It is clear that people just cannot cope with the complexities of privacy settings associated with the apps they have on their smartphones," said Norman Sadeh from CMU.