Can Smartphones and Privacy Coexist?

Assessing Technologies and Regulations Protecting Personal Data on Android and iOS Devices

As smartphones become more ubiquitous around the globe, policymakers inevitably have to grapple with issues related to the security and privacy of these devices. To aid in this understanding, in 2015, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) commissioned a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory and the RAND Corporation to assess smartphone users' privacy from both technical and regulatory perspectives. This report documents the team's approach and findings. On the technical side, it describes a literature review and experiments performed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory investigating the state of privacy of the two major smartphone platforms in 2015: Google's Android and Apple's iOS. On the regulatory side, this report describes a review by RAND of major federal regulatory mechanisms for protecting privacy in the United States and provides a tool to understand both privacy regulation and technology.

While privacy-preserving technology is improving, users' privacy concerns have not been fully addressed by the technology itself. Appropriate regulatory protections also play a role in protecting smartphone users' privacy. Currently, many gaps exist between regulation and technology: The two are not adequately paired to provide the desired protections. We believe that many of these gaps can be identified using a tool that the project team developed for policymakers. By combining technical and regulatory components associated with smartphone privacy, this matrix-based tool will help policymakers guide directions for future research and assess the impact of technical and regulatory solutions that have been or will be implemented.

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Continua qui: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1393.html