Context-Derived Pseudonyms for Protection of Privacy in Transport Middleware and Applications

Abstract

This paper outlines why context-aware transport applications necessarily record information about people and describes how we can use anonymity techniques to minimise the resulting invasion of privacy. In particular we: (i) describe how to generate unlinkable personal pseudonyms; (ii) describe a method of creating group pseudonyms (an opaque pseudonym representing several individuals); and (iii) describe how to store these pseudonyms safely in a database. We go on to present two sample transport applications which utilise our technique and suggest areas for future work