Trust and privacy in mobile experience sharing: future challenges and avenues for research

Mobile consumer devices are increasingly used as personal sensing instruments, where users record their daily habits, track their physical activity, or monitor their health. Research is underway to extend today's diversity of vendor-designed "walled garden" repositories, ultimately repositioning individuals as producers, consumers, and remixers of a vast openly shared public data set. By empowering people to easily measure, report, and compare their own personal environments, such tools transform everyday citizens into reporting agents who uncover and visualize unseen elements of their own everyday experiences. With this important new shift in mobile device usage - from a communication tool to a ubiquitous "experience sharing instrument" - comes a new dimension in trust and privacy challenges. Today's privacy and trust tools that address web surfing and simple location-based services already struggle to be adopted in practice. We argue that in order to prepare for tomorrow's sensor sharing, privacy and trust must be addressed holistically, incorporating both technical approaches and actual sharing behavior. This article summarizes the results of a five-day Dagstuhl Seminar on mobile experience sharing and outlines future research necessary in this domain.