The CONNECT platform: An architecture for Context-Aware Privacy in pervasive environments

Nowadays, privacy in mobile settings mostly is controlled manually and limited to acknowledging some prefabricated privacy statements offered to the user. However, for Ambient Intelligence scenarios such privacy control falls short for various reasons. The most obvious is that the interaction with a large number of heterogeneous Context-Aware Mobile Services becomes a burdensome task, which eventually might lead to frustration if newly encountered services require the explicit consensus of the user for the disclosure of privacy sensitive data. The IST project CONNECT addresses such issues by defining a common software platform for mediating between users, their privacy needs, privacy management and the context-aware mobile services. It includes not only the core technologies needed, but also easy-to-use interfaces and some self-learning technologies to assist users in the specification of privacy preferences matching their needs. In this paper, we introduce the CONNECT platform and its architecture with a special emphasize on the Context-sensitive Privacy Management middleware and its various functionalities.