Privacy Is The Best Policy: A Framework for BLE Beacon Privacy Management

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are an emerging type of technology in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) realm, which use BLE signals to broadcast a unique identifier that is detected by a compatible device to determine the location of nearby users. Beacons can be used to provide a tailored user experience with each encounter, yet can also constitute an invasion of privacy, due to their covertness and ability to track user behavior. Therefore, we hypothesize that user-driven privacy policy configuration is key to enabling effective and trustworthy privacy management during beacon encounters. We developed a framework for beacon privacy management that provides a policy configuration platform. Through an empirical analysis with 90 users, we evaluated this framework through a proof-of-concept app called Beacon Privacy Manager (BPM), which focused on the user experience of such a tool. Using BPM, we provided users with the ability to create privacy policies for beacons, testing different configuration schemes to refine the framework and then offer recommendations for future research.