1. This work was supported by the TRUST Center (NSF award number CCF-0424422) Many internet users blindly trust websites that actually misuse their information instead of protecting it. My research consists on looking for privacy flaws and complaints of internet users to see how much people know about internet privacy and other privacy related information. In order to get data I used the Yahoo! Answers API because it is publicly available. My group developed a script to obtain data from the API and stored it in a SQL database. Throughout the script development we encountered a series of errors. My contribution to this project involved resolving these errors and creating a log file. Process Flowchart: Internet Privacy Complaints Rafael J. Negrón 1, Nick Doty 2, Jen King 2, Prof. Deirdre Mulligan 2 1 University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, 2 University of California at Berkeley, School of Information Errors are solved by using the “Try – Except” technique in Python, known as “Try – Catch” in JAVA. Errors - (Their Exceptions): 1.Duplicates - (MySQLdb.IntegrityError): Solution : Ignores duplicated questions. 2.No Answer - (AttributeError): Solution : Add empty string to “chosenanswer” variable. 3.URL/File - (IOError): Solution: Notify the user the URL/File couldn't be opened. 4. Parser error - (xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError): Solution: Skip to the next word in the list, if any. 5. Special Characters - (UnicodeEncodeError): Solution: Encode data using “utf-8” encoding. 6.Eliminated Questions - (No exception): As QuestionID it has : “index:0/##/#/########” (# = Any digit in the range of 0 – 9) Solution : Added - “if (questionid.find('index:') == -1):”. If this condition isn’t met, the result will be ignored. I would like to thank the Team for Research in for Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) for this wonderful research experience and my mentors Jen King, Nick Doty, and professor Deirdre Mulligan for their guidance. Also I want to thank Dr. Kristen Gates and Sally Alcala for letting me have the opportunity to participate in this research program. Finally, my team members Chris Castillo, Jennifer Felder, Anand Sonkar and German Gomez for helping me complete my tasks. Thanks to all! Abstract Implementing Log File Solving Script Errors Acknowledgments The log consist of three steps: 1.opening a file and setting it to ‘append’, 2.writing to it the timestamp, entry level, and message, and 3.closing the file. If the log is not in the same directory as the script, it will throw an “IOError”. Entry Levels: Level 1: INFO, Level 2: DEBUG, Level 3: WARNING Results Keywords Results Pie Chart: Many Eyes Phrase Net Visualization: Added Queries Vs. Duplicates Graph: My next steps are creating a taxonomy of privacy words and terms, implementing a better log to overcome the actual limitations, and improving the code and list of keywords for better searches and results. Future Work Using the Yahoo! Answers API we found that people are really concerned about their privacy being violated but don’t know how to protect it. Also the most common used words were “privacy” and “security” as seen in the visualization and pie chart. In conclusion, people that don’t know how to protect their privacy will look for help in sites like Yahoo! Answers. Conclusion