Expressing Privacy Preferences in terms of Invasiveness

Dynamic context aware systems need highly flexible privacy protection mechanisms. We describe an extension to an existing RBAC-based mechanism that utilises a dynamic measure of invasiveness to determine whether contextual information should be released

Seamless mobility with personal servers

We describe the concept and the taxonomy of personal servers, and their implications in seamless mobility. Personal servers could offer electronic services independently of network availability or quality, provide a greater flexibility in the choice of user access device, and support the key concept of continuous user experience. We describe the organization of mobile and remote personal servers, define three relevant communication modes, and discuss means for users to exploit seamless services on the personal server

Privacy Issues in the Era of Ubiquitous Commerce

The vision of ubiquitous commerce (u-commerce) is realized through the convergence of electronic, mobile, television, voice and silent commerce applications. The ubiquity, universality, uniqueness, and unison of u-commerce will provide two principal benefits for individual users and companies: increased convenience as well as more personalized and customized services. However, u-commerce will also bring new issues such as a greater degree of privacy concerns that will impact individual users, companies, and the society at large. This paper proposes and elaborates on a conceptual framework for privacy in the u-commerce era. It combines Lessig’s macro-level perspective – the four-factor model of privacy – with Adam’s micro-level perspective – the perceived privacy factors model. Using this framework, privacy issues related to ucommerce are discussed and future research directions are presented

An information privacy taxonomy for collaborative environments

Purpose: Information Privacy is becoming an increasingly important field of research with many new definitions and terminologies. Along similar rates of increase are the use, uptake and expansion of Collaborative Environments. There is a need for a better understanding and classification of information privacy concepts and terms. The pur-pose of this paper is to provide a taxonomy of Information Privacy in Collaborative Environments. The knowledge provided from an information privacy taxonomy can be used to formulate better information privacy policies, practices, and privacy enhancing technologies (PET?s).Approach: Through the hierarchical classification and categorization of information privacy concepts and principles an organized representation of these components has been produced. Each area was well surveyed and researched and then classified into a number of sub-categories according to their nature and relevance.Findings: A taxonomy was successfully developed with the identification of three high level dimensions of information privacy. Within each dimensional view a further three sub-classifications were proposed each with their own unique nature.Originality: This paper provides an Information Privacy taxonomy for Collaborative Environments, the first of its kind to be proposed. A number of new Information Pri-vacy terms are defined that make up the categorization and classification of Informa-tion Privacy concepts and components

A privacy enhancing infrastructure for context-awareness

Context-awareness enables applications and services to better fulfil the needs of users by adapting to their situation and their preferences. However, the use of contextual information is complicated by privacy concerns. A subjects context is personal and needs to be regarded as sensitive. Hence, contextual information must only be used with the consensus of the subject and according to their privacy preferences. This thesis examines the development of privacy-friendly context-aware systems. In particular the focus is on (A) improving the overall level of privacy, (B) evaluating access control mechanisms, (C) providing development support, and (D) offering protection to third-party infrastructures. The hypothesis investigated is whether these objectives can be achieved through the use of a privacy enhancing infrastructure. As part of the investigation two conceptual models are presented describing the assumptions made about context and privacy. Also presented is a decentralised privacy enhancing infrastructure developed and implemented to determine the validity of the hypothesis. Along with the infrastructure mechanisms for privacy protection including authentication, access control, and anonymity are discussed. A general data format for context communication in the infrastructure is also presented. Finally the thesis presents the findings uncovered during the investigation and evaluation of the hypothesis. This includes a qualitative analysis of whether the privacy enhancing infrastructure meets the key objectives, a user survey examining the performance of two candidate access control mechanism, a performance measure of the infrastructure when run with resource constrained devices, and a comparison with the approaches taken in related work

A privacy enhancing infrastructure for context-awareness

Context-awareness enables applications and services to better fulfil the needs of users by adapting to their situation and their preferences. However, the use of contextual information is complicated by privacy concerns. A subjects context is personal and needs to be regarded as sensitive. Hence, contextual information must only be used with the consensus of the subject and according to their privacy preferences. This thesis examines the development of privacy-friendly context-aware systems. In particular the focus is on (A) improving the overall level of privacy, (B) evaluating access control mechanisms, (C) providing development support, and (D) offering protection to third-party infrastructures. The hypothesis investigated is whether these objectives can be achieved through the use of a privacy enhancing infrastructure. As part of the investigation two conceptual models are presented describing the assumptions made about context and privacy. Also presented is a decentralised privacy enhancing infrastructure developed and implemented to determine the validity of the hypothesis. Along with the infrastructure mechanisms for privacy protection including authentication, access control, and anonymity are discussed. A general data format for context communication in the infrastructure is also presented. Finally the thesis presents the findings uncovered during the investigation and evaluation of the hypothesis. This includes a qualitative analysis of whether the privacy enhancing infrastructure meets the key objectives, a user survey examining the performance of two candidate access control mechanism, a performance measure of the infrastructure when run with resource constrained devices, and a comparison with the approaches taken in related work.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A Design Rationale for Pervasive Computing - User Experience, Contextual Change, and Technical Requirements

The vision of pervasive computing promises a shift from information technology per se to what can be accomplished by using it, thereby fundamentally changing the relationship between people and information technology. In order to realize this vision, a large number of issues concerning user experience, contextual change, and technical requirements should be addressed. We provide a design rationale for pervasive computing that encompasses these issues, in which we argue that a prominent aspect of user experience is to provide user control, primarily founded in human values. As one of the more significant aspects of the user experience, we provide an extended discussion about privacy. With contextual change, we address the fundamental change in previously established relationships between the practices of individuals, social institutions, and physical environments that pervasive computing entails. Finally, issues of technical requirements refer to technology neutrality and openness--factors that we argue are fundamental for realizing pervasive computing. We describe a number of empirical and technical studies, the results of which have helped to verify aspects of the design rationale as well as shaping new aspects of it. The empirical studies include an ethnographic-inspired study focusing on information technology support for everyday activities, a study based on structured interviews concerning relationships between contexts of use and everyday planning activities, and a focus group study of laypeople’s interpretations of the concept of privacy in relation to information technology. The first technical study concerns the model of personal service environments as a means for addressing a number of challenges concerning user experience, contextual change, and technical requirements. Two other technical studies relate to a model for device-independent service development and the wearable server as a means to address issues of continuous usage experience and technology neutrality respectively

Evaluation criteria for trust models with specific reference to prejudice filters

The rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in the desperate need for alternative ways to keep electronic transactions secure while at the same time allowing entities that do not know each other to interact. This has, in turn, led to a wide area of interest in the issues of trust and trust modeling to be used by machines. A large amount of work has already been undertaken in this area in an attempt to transfer the trust and interaction decision making processes onto the machine. However this work has taken a number of different approaches with little to no correlation between various models and no standard set of criteria was even proposed that can be used to evaluate the value of such models. The proposed research chooses to use a detailed literature survey to investigate the current models in existence. This investigation focuses on identifying criteria that are required by trust models. These criteria are grouped into four categories that represent four important concepts to be implemented in some manner by trust models: trust representation, initial trust, trust update and trust evaluation. The process of identifying these criteria has led to a second problem. The trust evaluation process is a detailed undertaking requiring a high processing overhead. This process can either result in a value that allows an agent to trust another to a certain extent or in a distrust value that results in termination of the interaction. The evaluation process required to obtain the distrust value is just as process intensive as the one resulting in determining a level of trust and the constraints that will be placed on an interaction. This raises the question: How do we simplify the trust evaluation process for agents that have a high probability of resulting in a distrust value? This research solves this problem by adding a fifth category to the criteria already identified; namely: prejudice filters. These filters have been identified by the literature study and are tested by means of a prototype implementation that uses a specific scenario in order to test two simulation case studies.Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2008.Computer Scienceunrestricte