Privacy in location-aware systems

Abstract

As our world becomes more and more proliferated by sensors and mobile devices - often connected by wireless networks - there is the urging need to develop appropriate abstractions for application development and deployment. Those abstractions should shield applications from the physical properties of the devices thereby allowing applications to focus on information processing based on global conceptual views (of the world) in form of context models. This paper will briefly elaborate on the concern for privacy in location-aware systems by providing a few examples that should highlight the complexity of such concerns. We show that privacy needs well founded bases for handling user requirements appropriately. Additionally, we argue that privacy aspects in context model based systems should include and embed privacy protection and control mechanism as an integral part on all systems levels therefore increasing the usability of such systems from a user's point of view.