Privacy and Security within Intelligent Environments

This paper discusses the current research in maintenance of user’s privacy within an intelligent environment. The need to ensure user privacy within an intelligent environment means the development is as much a sociotechnical challenge as a technical one. Users must have complete confidence in the ability and willingness of an intelligent environment to keep their information private before the system will be used. The consideration of user privacy at the design stage is therefore essential to an intelligent environments success. The paper presents a privacy aware intelligent environment architecture that seeks to incorporate the user privacy and security design requirements for an intelligent environment. The architecture uses secure communication and user pseudonyms to maintain user privacy, and trusted third parties for secure identity management. User information is managed by the user’s privacy preferences, and the intelligent environment’s services are utilised in a way that minimises the risk to a user’s privacy.