Carlos Fernández Valdivielso

Disappearing for a while - using white lies in pervasive computing

The pervasive nature of future living environments, saturated with sensors and context-detecting services, pose a completely new challenge for computer science: the art of virtual disappearance. In many situations individuals do not want to be tracked by the environment and do not want their where abouts to be known publicly or even by their friends and relatives. Todays technology often allowsus to use white lies in such circumstances. The question we pose in this paper is: Can we achieve the same using pervasive computing technologies? In this paper we show how our User-centric Privacy Framework can be extended to allow users to pro-actively use white lies as a means to disguise their location or activity without sacrificing the use of context-services as a whole. As a result we are confident that also in the future we can perform some magic:disappearing for a while - when needed.

Obligations: Building a Bridge between Personal and Enterprise Privacy in Pervasive Computing

In this paper we present a novel architecture for extending the traditional notion of access control to privacy-related data toward a holistic privacy management system. The key elements used are obligations. They constitute a means for controlling the use of private data even after the data was disclosed to some third-party. Todays laws mostly are regulating the conduct of business between an individual and some enterprise. They mainly focus on long-lived and static relationships between a user and a service provider. However, due to the dynamic nature of pervasive computing environments, rather more sophisticated mechanisms than a simple offer/accept-based privacy negotiation are required. Thus, we introduce a privacy architecture which allows a user not only to negotiate the level of privacy needed in a rather automated way but also to track and monitor the whole life-cycle of data once it has been disclosed.

Towards personal privacy control

In this paper we address the realization of personal privacy control in pervasive computing.We argue that personal privacy demands differ substantially from those assumed in enterprise privacy control. This is demonstrated by introducing seven requirements specific for personal privacy, which are then used for the definition of our privacy policy language, called SenTry. It is designed to take into account the expected level of privacy from the perspective of the individual when interacting with context-aware services. SenTry serves as the base for implementing personal privacy in our User-centric Privacy Framework for pervasive computing.