Enabling personal privacy for pervasive computing environments

Abstract

Protection of personal data in the Internet is already a challenge today. Users have to actively look up privacy policies of websites and decide whether they can live with the terms of use. Once discovered, they are forced to make a ”‘take or leave”’ decision. In future living and working environments, where sensors and context-aware services are pervasive, this becomes an even greater challenge and annoyance. The environment is much more personalized and users cannot just ”‘leave”’. They require measures to prevent, avoid and detect misuse of sensitive data, as well as to be able to negotiate the purpose of use of data. We present a novel model of privacy protection, complementing the notion of enterprise privacy with the incorporation of personal privacy towards a holistic privacy management system. Our approach allows non-expert users not only to negotiate the desired level of privacy in a rather automated and simple way, but also to track and monitor the whole life-cycle of data.