Sensibility Testbed

Abstract

Due to their omnipresence, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets could be tremendously valuable to researchers as data gathering tools. However, since research projects can use these devices to collect data that reveals personal information, there are substantial privacy concerns with mobile device use. Therefore, researchers conducting such studies must go through a stringent IRB (Institutional Review Board) process before recruiting participants. As a result, many research studies either do not use data from real participants or use data collected from a controlled subset of participants. In this project I present Sensibility Testbed, a platform for researchers that lowers the policy and technical barriers to performing experiments on end users’ mobile devices. Data such as GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular or accelerometer information can be gathered through Sensibility Testbed at a reduced risk of privacy invasion. Its architecture enforces policies set by the IRB of the researcher’s institution, so that they cannot be bypassed. The enforcement mechanism is set of blurring layers that can be customized for any level of IRB compliance and that is augmented by policies set by the policies set by the device owner. These technical innovations simplify the IRB process and allow Sensibility Testbed to cater to a wider range of participants. Furthermore, the platform design of Sensibility Testbed saves the researchers the effort of recruiting participants and managing deployments. Our evaluation shows that Sensibility Testbed also limits the impact that a buggy or malicious experiment could have on end-user privacy. In other words, Sensibility Testbed is a smartphone testbed that allows researchers to run code and perform easurements on others’ smartphones for research purposes. It ensures the security of user-owned devices, and the privacy of user-generated data. The usage model of Sensibility Testbed is unique in that it manages how device owners make their devices accessible to different research communities without putting their devices at risk. Meanwhile, it offers technical resources that allow researchers to collect data from remote mobile devices without impairing the device owner’s privacy. As an added bonus, different research groups can pick, choose,share and reuse each other's' user base.