TreasurePhone: Context-Sensitive User Data Protection on Mobile Phones

Due to increased input and output capabilities, mobile phones hold many different kinds of (mostly private) data. The need for finer grained profiles and integrated data security on mobile phones has already been documented extensively (e.g. [1]). However, there are no appropriate concepts and implementations yet to handle and limit access to data on mobile phones. TreasurePhone has been designed to address this specific problem. It protects the users' mobile phone data based on their current context. Privacy protection is realized by spheres, which represent the users' context-specific need for privacy. That is, users can define which data and services are accessible in which sphere. TreasurePhone exploits context information to support authentication and automatic activation of spheres by locations and actions. We conducted a user study with 20 participants to gain insights on how well users accept such a concept. One of the main goals was to find out whether such privacy features are appreciated by the users even though they make interaction slower and might hinder fast access to specific data. Additionally, we showed that integration of context information significantly increases ease-of-use of the system.