A Privacy-Preserving Context Ontology (PPCO) for Smart Connected Toys

Abstract

Ubiquitous mobile technology like Smart Connected Toys (SCTs) have unique challenges of clearly defining context data elements due to unstructured, consistent, and persistent changes in the environment. SCTs interact with its context to achieve meaningful functionality while maintaining context data privacy. As SCTs become increasingly pervasive, the toys with their built-in features must be aware of and adapt to their changing contexts while providing a sense of privacy and security to contextual data processed to support its use. This paper presents a context profile through SCT Privacy-Preserving Context Ontology (PPCO) and examines the benefits of designing a context data model for SCT privacy goals. Our proposed data context model is an abstract model, which organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another. It organizes properties of related entries in SCT based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to depict and project how the SCT contextual information - related to the SCTs' environment - is assembled and maintained. Ultimately, the PPCO provides a structured description of the SCT context profile necessary to identify needed privacy controls to support SCT privacy goals.