Discreet City: Protecting Privacy at Large Scale

Recent advances in mobile communications, location/sensing technologies and data processing are boosting the deployment of context-aware services and smart spaces creation. This is reflected in urban environments by the smart-city vision, a city with advanced ICT and surveillance infrastructures offering to citizens a diversity of services. Nevertheless, privacy risks and threats ambush, since collection and process of large amount of personal data occur. Although technology enables the collection of data, its protection against abuse is left to data protection legislation. However, privacy and security requirements, other than being general and abstract terms to be regarded as legislature issues, should be brought down in the technological reality and carefully accounted for in devising technical solutions. In order to limit the disclosure and misuse of citizens' personal data, this report introduces a distributed unit of trust, as a mediating entity that manages, in a privacy respectful manner, the exchange of private data.