Who, how, and why? Enhancing privacy awareness in Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

The combination and integration of sensing and interaction capabilities with almost ubiquitous inter-connectivity are basic requirements for context-aware systems to unobtrusively and invisibly support users in their daily activities. However, the invisible nature of such systems also threatens users' privacy. Users often lack awareness about a system's capabilities to gather data or to intervene in user activities, or even the system's presence. We propose a model to enhance user-centric privacy awareness by consistently modeling observations and disturbances of users. The model allows to capture who is affecting a user's privacy, how privacy is affected, and why it is affected. We further discuss how this model can be instantiated with discovery of channel policies.