Privacy-Aware Modelling and Distribution of Context Information in Pervasive Service Provision

Context awareness is an essential cornerstone in future pervasive computing systems. It has the potential to greatly reduce the user attention and interaction bottlenecks, to give humans the impression that services fade into the background, and to support intelligent personalization features. Nevertheless, in order to create such an environment, a growing amount of personal information has to be provided to the system, either manually or automatically. Hence the digital trace and representation users have in the system is getting dangerously detailed, thus stressing the need for privacy protection. DAIDALOS (Satyanarayanan, 2001) is a European research project in the area of 3G and beyond, which aims to combine heterogeneous networks in a transparent and seamless way, and develop on top of this a pervasive environment for applications and end-users. This paper describes the main models and mechanisms that have been established to provide federated context-aware services and protect the privacy of their users