A scheme for quantizing privacy in context-aware ubiquitous computing

Privacy is one of the areas of security with tradeoffs in ubiquitous computing and tends to a difficult, yet necessary, design issue in such dynamic environments. Context and social nuances contribute to creating privacy for the user, making it a meta-property. Developers currently incorporate little support in designing frameworks that help end- users manage their privacy in an undaunted way. In this paper, we present a scheme for introducing granularity of user privacy in context-aware systems deployed in ubiquitous computing environments. Our scheme aims to configure the privacy of the overall system (1) based on the overall privacy set by the user and (2) dynamically, based on the context rulesets and policies. We strive to make perception of privacy intuitive for the user, yet allowing the scheme to be adept in resolving context. We consider two real life situations and present results demonstrating the implementation of our scheme.