Design Guidelines for Analysis and Safeguarding of Privacy Threats in Ubicomp Applications

Abstract

Realisation of the Ubicomp vision in the real world creates significant threats to personal privacy due to constant information collection by numerous tiny sensors, active information exchange over short and long distances, long-term storage of large quantities of data, and reasoning on collected and stored data. An analysis of more than 100 Ubicomp scenarios, however, shows that applications nowadays are often developed without considering privacy issues. This paper suggests guidelines for estimation of threats to privacy, depending on real world application settings and on choice of technology; and guidelines for developing technological safeguards against privacy threats.