Preserve Your Privacy with PCO: A Privacy Sensitive Architecture for Context Obfuscation for Pervasive E-Community Based Applications

Context awareness is just beginning to revolutionize the ways we interact with networked devices. In order for context awareness to flourish, especially in a pervasive environment, users must be certain that their privacy is respected. Privacy in pervasive online community depends on the level of granularity of the provided information, user´s relation to possible recipients, and the possible usage of user´s data. Conventional privacy preservation techniques are not suitable for these pervasive applications. The notion of this paper is to present the preliminary results of using a unique architecture of obfuscation techniques to preserve users´ privacy in e-community based applications. This paper describes our current work in developing a novel Privacy-sensitive architecture for Context Obfuscation (PCO) for privacy preservation in pervasive online community based applications. More specifically, PCO safeguards a user´s privacy by generalizing the contextual data (e.g. the user´s current activity) provided to the applications and distributed to the user´s peers. To support multiple levels of granularity for the released contextual data, the obfuscation procedure uses an ontological description that states the granularity of object type instances. We have developed and evaluated a contextual instant messaging application (PCO application) in Android platform that incorporates level-based privacy of the user´s contextual information. We also evaluate our prototype application through user evaluation survey.