Presence Technology with Its Security and Privacy Implications

With its broadening scope, presence technology is gaining significant interest and becoming an indispensable component in nowadays telecommunications industry as well as in the vertical market. Presence-based services are driving new business opportunities and changing every aspect of our daily life. Meanwhile, with the sensitive nature of rich presence information, security and privacy issues are among the greatest concerns to the end-users of presence-based services. In the present paper, we briefly introduce the presence technology, the evolution of the presence notion and the fundamental model of presence service. We also give an overview of presence- based services together with example implementations of presence-enhanced directory services in enterprise environment. Understanding the presence technology and presence-based services together with their design issues is an important prerequisite to discuss security and privacy implications of presence-based services.