Enhancing privacy in social applications with the notion of group context

Nowadays, a large user community uses the Internet as a platform for manifold interactions. While sharing content, communicating or collaborating, users share a common context which can be exploited by services to adapt to users needs or to support collaborations. In this paper, we introduce group context as a means for clearly separating individual context knowledge from context information shared among the members of a group in a social interaction. Group context is established by a negotiation process among all group members keeping all participants under control of their individual context knowledge. We introduce a modeling approach for group context and define a process to establish group context based on the individual context of all group members. The feasibility of our approach is illustrated based on a social networking scenario.