Towards the Modeling of Personal Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Privacy is a known barrier to the acceptance of ubiquitous computing technologies because they require individuals to trade control of their personal information and personal spaces for improved quality of life and assistance with daily activities. Previous work has been done to analyze and protect privacy in ubiquitous computing environments, but such efforts do not include a formal underlying model. We seek to approach the privacy problem from a different perspective. Namely, we seek to propose, verify, and analyze a formal model of privacy for these environments. In this paper, we discuss the beginning stages of our model, namely the resources that need to be protected, the guidelines for constructing the model, and the high-level components of our personal privacy model.