01/21: Chris Kanich

[smiklin]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[bakerwho]

Thank you for presenting at our workshop! Your operationalization of the axes along which users think about their data on the cloud was a clear and useful framework that I'm sure I'll keep coming back to.

While reading this research, I couldn't help but think about my own inertia (for years now) against organizing my Google Drive storage. I recently bit the bullet and paid for additional storage - especially now that I'm having to keep track of data across multiple Google accounts. At the same time, I certainly have a lot of personal data on hard drives which is differently concerning - it is arguably more secure to access a file on another computer via the cloud rather than plugging in a pen drive and uploading it there!

What does your work on Aletheia say about the types of new paradigms users might find valuable in managing their data? Do you see a feature like 'delete by X date' or 'ask me to delete in Y days' being useful or catching on? Do you see these solutions coming from within organizations like Dropbox and Google, or do you think they might be disrupted by new 'smart file management' SaaS technologies (especially if they can integrate well with these platforms as your MTurk study seems to have done)?

[Raychanan]

People often forget that they have stored certain files on cloud services like Google Cloud and Dropbox. Considering the protection of user risk, you have designed Aletheia to predict the usefulness and sensitivity of files, and the accuracy of this algorithm seems to be pretty good.

My concern is that even though such algorithms are very mature, some companies may still not give users such buttons (or alerts) about deleting files for profit purposes. I see that the recent new policies of Google Cloud and Google Photos are actually shrinking the amount of free cloud storage users can use, thus driving people to pay for additional storage. So, from a profitability perspective, I think companies have an incentive not to take advantage of algorithms like Aletheia. Can I ask you what you think about this problem? Thanks!

[ahaseros]

Professor Kanich,

Thank you for sharing your research with us! As I recently migrated all my work from cloud storage to a self-managed NAS, I spent some time pondering the tradeoff between ease of use and efficiency of cloud storage. My questions are as follows.

1. I am curious as to whether the observed effects would translate to other external storage mediums, or even internal storage. I know from experience that Drive and Box can quickly turn into a graveyard for files - especially when one is regularly shared on files. Do you think people would hold the same preferences for external hard drives, or even folders on the desktops of old computers? What is it about cloud storage specifically that drives this behavior?

2. To a similar point, how much of the observed effect do you think may be attributable to HUI elements common to cloud storage? I wonder if users would be as quick to delete/encrypt/offload certain files if a clear directory structure and supporting GUI were overlayed, potentially even using automated processes.

[j2401]

Hello,

Thank you for sharing your research with us!

I am currently a heavy user of Dropbox, therefore your research immediately reminds me of checking files in my Cloud storage. I find that most of them are documents (HWs, paper, codes) and a large proportion of them are totally useless, for example .aux and .log files for LaTeX compiling. However, just as @MkramerPsych mentioned, it seems that huge collection of forgotten files also appears in my old computers and even my laptop in use. Do you believe that Cloud Services are more vulnerable to the risk of breach? If not, would you believe people are holding similar or different attitudes towards forgotten files that left in cloud storage and hardware devices?

[Lynx-jr]

Hi Professor Kanich, thanks for sharing your research with us! I don't have questions to be honest but my thoughts of the question from @Raychanan is that maybe Google does not have enough incentives to incorporate Aletheia for individuals to use, there are still application scenarios in private companies' databases and that's always a larger piece of pie. Service providers like google could also consider streaming the data that is used less into other servers to reduce pressure (not an expert on this so I'm just making a wild guess).

It is fun to read everyone's experience of cloud storage and I'd like to share mine as well: Google Cloud (barely use it); Baiduyunpan (the Chinese Google Cloud, VVIP account till today for storing games). But I got tired of enduring the net speed constraint, so I bought a portable hard disk last year of 1T.

[boyafu]

Professor Kanich,
Thank you for sharing this fascinating research! I am curious about the origin of the abundance in digital storage. Is this phenomenon rising with the new era, or the advancing storage techniques somehow magnify people's inherent habits? In the latter case, it might be more like a tradeoff between convenience and awareness of potential risks.

[lulululugagaga]

Thanks for sharing!
Waste in cloud storage is indeed a big problem. Based on my knowledge, most tech companies in China do not earn money from this service. Rather, they just wish to use this service to keep their customers more active. Therefore, much of their effort is spent on saving the storage space. Baidu, for example, owns an advanced technology for immediate data splitting and assembling, which helps the company to maintain its leading position in this field because such technology achieves data slices storage and they don't have to pay for data storage files as a whole.

[NikkiTing]

Thank you for sharing your work! I agree with what @Raychanan has mentioned about private companies. With the convenience and relatively smaller costs associated with cloud-storage services, I think more people are turning to paid services to store more and more of their files (e.g., rather than buying external hard drives). And one likely factor driving people to opt to buy more cloud storage is that they are too lazy or don’t have the time to manage a large accumulation of files. Private companies likely take advantage of this behavior and may not have the incentive to adopt retrospective cloud data management systems. Given an increasing number of people are probably paying for extra cloud storage, I would like to ask how you think the observations from your research would compare to the behavior of users of paid cloud-storage services.

[ttsujikawa]

Thank you for sharing your interesting and fascinating work.
I personally feel that the abundance of digital files has been increasingly problematic especially since people started unthoughtfully storing their personal information. In my opinion, I need companies to be more responsible for potential risks. Is there any way that private companies make sure the protection of a huge amount of digital data, any cases?

[skanthan95]

Thank you for sharing this important work! My peers have asked the questions that I had in mind, so I'll ask some more general questions about cloud storage.

• There's a clear latency between understanding insights from data security research and updating relevant laws to protect consumer interests - do you think this latency has been addressed/corrected, and if not, what's the most crucial next step?

• What's the most important thing for a consumer to keep in mind when negotiating a tailored contract with a cloud provider, with clauses about desired privacy commitments?

• And - under what circumstances would it be ethical for a cloud provider to use consumer data for its own purposes?

[xzmerry]

Professor Kanich,

Thanks for sharing this research with us! It is meaningful and related to everyone's daily life, as I often encounter such data management problems when using cloud storage. A lot of questions I had when reading your first paper were addressed in the second paper, but some still remain:

First, how you control or eliminate selection biases here? Since the research is kind of sensitive and people might hesitate to participate, how you ensure that the patterns we observed were not induced by selection bias? A more statistical check might be better? (In the first paper, your explanation is that people in the survey might have less sensitive data in their storage, and there were still some sensitive data in their storage. But you also mentioned people's attitudes towards cloud storage vary with their understanding of how the cloud work, so those who participated might also have a better understanding of cloud storage and regard it as a safer choice.)

Second, I am still curious about some ethical details mentioned in your paper (though you have stressed it). How you ensure that there would be no leakage of privacy here technically? Also, how you convince the users to participate in this research?

What is more, a conceptual question, as "participants perceived cloud storage to be less secure than local storage", and they might tend to store less sensitive data in the cloud, how you think of the value of this research? And what kind of security should the data management strategies aim to be under this setting?

Thx

[chrismaurice0]

Thank you for Professor Kanich,

I am curious as to the motivations behind writing these two papers, both of which were fascinating. As someone who uses google drive solely as a backup for what is on my hard drive, I have never been that concerned with any personal information that exists in the cloud because those same files exist on my hard drive. I know having files stored on the cloud presents a risk, but not any greater than the risk of having files on my hard drive. Did you ask the participants questions about privacy concerns with the cloud versus a hard drive? Are you instead interested in freeing up storage in the cloud?

[JadeBenson]

I've been really interested in the push for greater privacy on social media (like the right to be forgotten) and its many challenges - but I had never thought about these issues in regards to Cloud storage. Thank you for introducing me to this and for your thoughtful research.

I was particularly interested in your discussion on property and privacy perceptions of shared files. I could imagine a case where one user has shared information which they deem as now undesirable, but the recipient wants to retain the information to pursue legal action (I'm sure you can also see how this could be used unethically too). You mention a few possibilities in your paper and I was just wondering what are your opinions on how to handle shared files and how would you adjust the algorithm to reflect this? Do you think other security features could be developed like warning users that shared files have been accessed at different frequencies by the recipient, differences in "uselessness" perception between the two, the recipient selects different storage preferences when prompted than the user, etc.?

[rkcatipon]

Dr Kanich, thank you for sharing your work! Is there a good rule of thumb everyday consumers like myself should consider when managing their private data? Because of other data breaches and given how easy it is to track personal information online, I have very little expectation of my own privacy. At this point, I expect companies to companies to use my data to advance their own business objectives, with or without my knowledge. What are some of the ways consumers can learn more about privacy vulnerabilities and also demand more privacy features from their providers?

[SnowMama915]

Dr. Kanich, I really enjoy reading your paper. It's an interesting and important issue to explore. It just comes up to me that we may use the advanced prediction model to predict what kinds of files are the users may want to delete, stop sharing, etc. And the cloud storage service could automatically ask its users whether they want to delete, share this file. That might be a good application of the prediction model : )