Privacy Control Requirements for Context-Aware Mobile Services

Abstract

With the rapid developments of mobile telecommunications technology over the last two decades, a new computing paradigm known as ‘anywhere and anytime’ or ‘ubiquitous’ computing has evolved. Consequently, attention has been given not only to extending current Web services and mobile service models and architectures, but increasingly also to make these services context-aware. Privacy represents one of the hot topics that has questioned the success of these services. In this chapter, we discuss the different requirements of privacy control in context-aware services architectures. Further, we present the different functionalities needed to facilitate this control. The main objective of this control is to help end users make consent decisions regarding their private information collection under conditions of uncertainty. The proposed functionalities have been prototyped and integrated in a UMTS locationbased mobile services testbed platform on a university campus. Users have experienced the services in real time. A survey of users’ responses on the privacy functionality has been carried out and analyzed as well. Users’ collected response on the privacy functionality was positive in most cases. Additionally, results obtained reflected the feasibility and usability of this approach.