Data Mishandling and Profile Building in Ubiquitous Environments

In any systems or environments within a ubiquitous computing context that promotes the concept of users interaction or inter-organization communication, more specifically data sharing and takes users within such context as relevant contextual information, there is the potential for interactions between systems to occur that may affect the security of the overall system. We present a scenario that aims to highlight such potential problems, in particular the problem of security at sharing information and protecting profile building from such shared information. This scenario considers cooperation and interactions between individuals and systems that might occur in the context of a public event, such as a conference, crisis situation or entertainment event. Based on this we present a modelling tool able to highlight potential information sharing and profile building issues as well as access violations that might occur through the transfer of data between multiple individuals and suggest ways of defining policies dynamically and filtering only relevant contextual information for the user, to mitigate such a problem.