Exploring the Feasibility of a Spatial User Interface Paradigm for Privacy-Enhancing Technology

Electronic devices get more and more involved in many of our communication processes for personal and professional activities. Each communication process may implicitly affect our privacy. An example may be the location trace of mobile phones. Experts present identity management systems to preserve the user’s privacy [2]. In digital correspondence users should decide about disclosure of personally identifiable information (in the following simply called “data”). However, identity management for Everyman is not yet a commonplace. To address the whole area of identity management, it is necessary to find an easy to understand model similar to the usage of a phone or a debit card. We suppose that after the shell and command line solutions and the window-based interface, one now has to look for a new paradigm to provide more intuitive handling of the communication process and work flow. In particular, we have been interested in how to facilitate for users to manage several preference settings, so that different communication partners are treated differently by the user’s identity management tool without demanding the user to change settings during ordinary use of his communication devices. We refine the “Virtual City” idea, originally proposed by Andreas Pfitzmann and published in [7], using a town map as a user interface, to manage identity related processes regarding these devices. This interface could potentially allow users with various levels of education to manage their digital identities intuitively by transferring their existing ex-