PRIVACY-FOCUSED CONTACT MANAGEMENT APP WITH FULL USER CONTROL ON PERSONAL INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION

Abstract

Through numerous means of communication, information is distributed every day at very high speeds. This includes personal information that may not be meant for public consumption. The spread of personal information has become a concern in the modern world, especially because most individuals do not truly have full control of their own personal information anymore. These days, personal information of many individuals is handled by multiple outside entities such as organizations and government authorities, making it nearly impossible to accurately track the spread of information. Once a piece of personal information owned by an individual is obtained by outside entities, it is never truly theirs anymore. These pieces of information can be anything, including contact details of an individual. In fact, one of the largest privacy concerns of today is the spread of personal contact details as they can be abused easily by individuals with malicious intent. This thesis proposes an improved contact management system that provides users with full control of their personal information and privacy decisions. Users’ core identity is always concealed within the system, meaning no one can have access to the primary identifier of the user. Instead, communications are done through secondary identifiers that are managed entirely by the users themselves. In contrast to commonly used contact management systems, information is stored in the cloud instead of locally, making it possible for users to revoke other people’s access to their data whenever they please. Users are also given full access to activities conducted to their data, allowing them to take effective privacy measures in relation to these activities. The system also implements a crowd-based verification method to prevent identity fraud using the Wilson Confidence Interval, an interval commonly used to sort rankings based on community voting.