Privacy protection in pervasive systems: State of the art and technical challenges

Pervasive and mobile computing applications are dramatically increasing the amount of personal data released to service providers as well as to third parties. Data includes geographical and indoor position of individuals, their movement patterns as well as sensor-acquired data that may reveal individuals’ physical conditions, habits, and, in general, information that may lead to undesired consequences like unsolicited advertisement or more serious ones like discrimination and stalking. In this survey paper, at first we consider representative classes of pervasive applications, and identify the requirements they impose in terms of privacy and trade-off with service quality. Then, we review the most prominent privacy preservation approaches, we discuss and summarize them in terms of the requirements. Finally, we take a more holistic view of the privacy problem by discussing other aspects that turn out to be crucial for the widespread adoption of privacy enhancing technologies. We discuss technical challenges like the need for tools augmenting the awareness of individuals and to capture their privacy preferences, as well as legal and economic challenges. Indeed, on one side privacy solutions must comply to ethical and legal requirements, and not prevent profitable business models, while on the other side it is unlikely that privacy preserving solutions will become practical and effective without new regulations.