Interactive privacy management for Internet of Things

Al Muhander, Bayan 2025. Interactive privacy management for Internet of Things. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

	PDF (Bayan Al Muhander, PhD, Thesis) - Accepted Post-Print Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 28 October 2026 due to copyright restrictions. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (91MB)
	PDF (Cardiff University Electronic Publication Form) - Supplemental Material Restricted to Repository staff only Download (255kB)

Abstract

The balance between protecting user privacy while providing cost-effective devices that are functional and usable is a key challenge in the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT). In traditional desktop and mobile, the primary interface is a screen; however, in IoT, screens are rare or small, invalidating many existing approaches to protecting user privacy. Users increasingly bring IoT devices into their environments without understanding how their data is gathered, processed, and used. Furthermore, users encounter various complexities in configuring their privacy settings, including a lack of transparency and difficulty locating the settings. Privacy visualisations are a common approach for assisting users in understanding the privacy implications. This thesis delves into providing usable privacy approaches to protect user privacy when using IoT. It explores novel approaches to address this balance, with an emphasis on privacy visualisation and user-friendly interfaces. This thesis provides three contributions. First, by scrutinising existing approaches to privacy visualisation across web, mobile, and IoT, we identified a challenge in privacy management (awareness and control) in the IoT domain. Building upon this, second, we established a link between privacy and data physicalisation. Accordingly, we proposed PrivacyCube, a novel data physicalisation designed to elevate privacy awareness within smart homes. Third, we explored privacy and tangible interfaces, from which we introduced PriviFy (Privacy Simplify-er). PriviFy is a novel user-friendly tangible interface aimed at simplifying the control of smart devices’ privacy settings. Through a series of studies, we validate PrivacyCube and PriviFy. PrivacyCube emerges as a valuable tool for enhancing privacy awareness. PriviFy demonstrates great potential in addressing the challenges associated with privacy configuration. Overall, the experimental results demonstrated in this thesis confirm our hypothesis that data physicalisation and tangible interface improved privacy management in IoT by enhancing users’ privacy awareness and control.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 October 2025
Date of Acceptance:	23 October 2025
Last Modified:	29 Oct 2025 14:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181963

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item