In search of user privacy protection in ubiquitous computing

Participatory applications provide users with value-added and reusable information; however, collection of this information comes at the expense of the participants´ privacy. Preserving the mobile participants´ privacy is a key concern of mobile computing. This paper outlines current participatory application system model, privacy weaknesses, and existing privacy enhancing technologies. Next, it proposes a study to address mobile privacy protection by educating participants of exploitable privacy areas of their participatory applications. The contribution of the paper is two-fold: it provides a review of the existing privacy weaknesses of PS applications and demonstrates that participants´ wanting to know more about these weaknesses warrants further study.