Context Quality and Privacy - Friends or Rivals?

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.

For the benefit of the user many mobile devices and applications communicate with others to perform their tasks. Therefore, we see the need to give users some kind of control when and to which extend to allow applications to communicate with other (mobile) devices or applications. In particular, a user should be allowed to determine how much (s)he is willing to share personal (private)data with others when participating in such context aware infrastructures. That is, the user should have control over how much his/her personal data is accessed by or communicated to other systems if privacy is a concern to him/her.

This paper will elaborate on the concern for privacy in location-aware systems by providing various examples that should highlight the complexity of such concerns. We show that privacy needs a well founded base for handling user requirements appropriately. Often, privacy is not a static property, but it is context sensitive thus increasing the overall complexity of managing privacy according to the user’s expectations. Additionally, we argue that quality aspects in context model based systems should include and embed privacy protection and control mechanism as an integral part on all levels therefore increasing the usability of such systems from a user’s point of view.