CA2P: An Approach for Privacy-Safe Context-Aware Services for Mobile Phones

Plenty mobile applications nowadays offer location-based services. To differentiate one from the many others, there is an emerging trend where developer adds more context information beyond the location information. The aim of using more context information is to offer better user experiences. However there is a tradeoff between offering better user experiences and having to gather and store a huge amount of data. From the user perspective, there is a tradeoff between having better experience and allowing their contextual information being gathered and stored by the application developers. The latter concern is commonly known as user privacy concern. In this paper we present a method called Context Aware Profile Packages (CA2P). CA2P allows the provision of privacy-safe context-aware recommendation services. Moreover, as compared to the other context-aware architectures, CA2P architecture gives the users the possibility to use the data network on request base without limitation of the quality of the service.