Awareness and Control of Personal Data Based on the Cyber-I Privacy Model

Cyber-Individual (Cyber-I), is a counterpart of Real-Individual (Real-I) in cyberspace. It will gradually approximate to its Real-I and be able to provide better personalized digital services. The accuracy of this approximation is successively improved by continuously acquiring and utilizing personal data or information related to a person. However, the collection, processing, and access of sensitive personal data may bring a great privacy problem since people may not like their personal data being collected or kept by others. The problem has been receiving increasing attention from both ordinary people and technical researchers who try to offer privacy controls with following users´ privacy settings. However, these privacy settings are application-oriented and have to be done manually by users for different applications. To provide a generic and user-centric privacy protection mechanism, this paper proposes a Cyber-I privacy model (CIPM) that is a systematic description about a user´s privacy preference, policy and rules, which are generated semi-automatically according to each user´s characteristics. Advantages of the user-centric CIPM are twofold: (1) reflecting a user´s privacy needs to different applications, (2) adapting to a user´s privacy demand changes. Moreover, a platform for CIPM initialization and update is developed, and the privacy protection of personal data is realized through not only control but also awareness based on the CIPM.