Dynamic user reconfigurable privacy and trust settings for collaborative industrial environments

There is no doubting that collaborative industrial environments have become increasingly more popular as enterprise solutions for knowledge sharing. They facilitate information and data processing capabilities beyond the natural borders set within an organization. However, with this increased information openness and communications comes serious threats to both individual and organisational privacy. Privacy is a serious consideration and often legal obligation for most organizations. Current approaches to protecting privacy in collaborative environments have proven inadequate. We propose a novel framework to address the issues of privacy and trust in collaborative industrial environments. Our framework provides users with control over their personal information through reconfigurable access and privacy control settings. We use a collaborative environment suggestion box application to analyse how the framework is implemented, along with the benefits it provides for protecting privacy.