Modeling privacy control in context-aware systems

Significant complexity issues challenge designers of context-aware systems with privacy control. Information spaces provide a way to organize information, resources, and services around important privacy-relevant contextual factors. In this article, we describe a theoretical model for privacy control in context-aware systems based on a core abstraction of information spaces. We have previously focused on deriving socially based privacy objectives in pervasive computing environments. Building on Ravi Sandhu's four-layer OM-AM (objectives, models, architectures, and mechanisms) idea, we aim to use information spaces to construct a model for privacy control that supports our socially based privacy objectives. We also discuss how we can introduce decentralization, a desirable property for many pervasive computing systems, into our information space model, using unified privacy tagging.