Abstract
Protecting user's privacy is one of the main concerns for the deployment of pervasive computing systems in the real world. In pervasive environments, the user context information is naturally distributed among different spatial or logical domains. Many efforts have been done to match the service privacy policy with the user's privacy preferences. However, since the pervasive environments are characterized by a large number of available services as well as a large amount of context information, the privacy protection mechanism poses two main requirements. Firstly, policies are created on a per task basis. We argue here that specifying the privacy on a per domain basis facilitates specifying the privacy preferences for the user. Secondly, to ease specifying the user' privacy preferences, an intuitive mechanisms to specifying the context information that can be consumed by services are thus needed. In this paper, and in order to bridge the gap of the context information perception by the developers and by the users, we propose to represent the available context information in each domain as a feature model. In this way, the developers are able to configure this feature model to get the context information they need, the users can easily specify the context features they are willing to share. The result is a domain-oriented user-centric privacy protection scheme.
Highlights
In pervasive environments the user is surrounded by a large number of devices which cooperate together to create a context-aware environment that supports her in everyday activities, e.g., business, health care, or education
Since the pervasive environments discover and take advantage of contextual information to make decisions about how to dynamically provide services to meet user requirements, the user privacy protection and enforcement naturally becomes a main concern and obstacle prohibiting the wide spread of the pervasive environment paradigm
We propose here to extend the context feature model idea to address key concern of preserving privacy in contextaware pervasive computing environments: privacy management
Summary
In pervasive environments the user is surrounded by a large number of devices which cooperate together to create a context-aware environment that supports her in everyday activities, e.g., business, health care, or education. If the computational system is invisible as well as extensive, it becomes hard to know what is controlling what, what is connected to what, where information is flowing, how it is being used...and what are the consequences of any given action” [6] Under this perspective, and in order to efficiently enforce the user privacy requirements across domains, the context manager in each domain should protect user’s context information over different levels of granularity. We propose a lightweight privacy enforcement framework which provides privacy mechanisms that allow developers and end-users to support a spectrum of trust levels and privacy needs It is a lightweight because it does not provide a comprehensive privacy enforcement solution as this requires a combination of technology, legislation, corporate policy, and social norms [4]. 1 1 1 0
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