Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 2, number 1, 2009 // View article

User Preferences to Support Privacy Policy Handling in Pervasive/Ubiquitous Systems

Authors:
Elizabeth Papadopoulou
Sarah McBurney
Nick Taylor
M. Howard Williams
Yussuf Abu Shaaban

Keywords: User preferences; privacy; pervasive systems; policies

Abstract:
An important approach for handling user privacy in ubiquitous or pervasive systems is identity management, in which the user has a number of different virtual identities that conceal his/her real identity. One extension of the basic approach identifies the private data needed by services and uses the notion of a privacy policy to determine what access should be granted to private data by a service. This can then be used to determine an appropriate virtual identity. However, this is fairly complex and difficult for a naïve user to set up and control. Thus a major challenge lies in determining to what extent the decisions relating to the selection of virtual identities can be done automatically, and to what extent the user needs to be involved. This paper describes an approach in which user preferences are used to assist in taking these decisions - both to generate privacy policies and to select an appropriate virtual identity. The user preferences are simpler for the user to create and modify and are also easier for automatic learning techniques to update. This approach will help to create more user-friendly and acceptable identity management systems. These ideas have been explored within the Daidalos pervasive system while further work is being carried out for the Persist system.

Pages: 62 to 71

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 7, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636