Towards territorial privacy in smart environments

Abstract

Territorial privacy is an old concept for privacy of the personal space dating back to the 19th century. Despite its former relevance, territorial privacy has been neglected in recent years, while privacy research and legislation mainly focused on the issue of information privacy. However, with the prospect of smart and ubiquitous environments, territorial privacy deserves new attention. Walls, as boundaries between personal and public spaces, will be insufficient to guard territorial privacy when our environments are permeated with numerous computing and sensing devices, that gather and share real-time information about us. Territorial privacy boundaries spanning both the physical and virtual world are required for the demarcation of personal spaces in smart environments. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the issue of territorial privacy in smart environments. We further propose a real-time user-centric observation model to describe multimodal observation channels of multiple physical and virtual observers. The model facilitates the definition of a territorial privacy boundary by separating desired from undesired observers, regardless of whether they are physically present in the user’s private territory or virtually participating in it. Moreover, we outline future research challenges and identify areas of work that require attention in the context of territorial privacy in smart environments.