Context-Adaptive Privacy: Leveraging Context Awareness to Support Privacy Decision Making

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing applications introduce multiple privacy challenges due to their sensing and actuation capabilities, which are often combined with ubiquitous interconnectivity. Because of the complexity of many ubicomp systems, users might have difficulties estimating the privacy implications of their actions and decisions. In this article, the authors discuss leveraging awareness about a user's context and respective context changes to dynamically support privacy decision making. They present an operationalization of Irwin Altman's privacy regulation theory for this purpose, describing how individual phases of the process can be supported. They also report on their experiences in developing context-adaptive privacy mechanisms for different applications and domains. This article is part of a special issue on privacy and security.