DoCoDeMo Phone: An Imperceptible Approach for Privacy Protection

Privacy protection on user context is one of the most important issues in ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This paper describes a new privacy protection approach that not only filters and reduces the granularity of context information to correct access level granularity, but also intelligently replace the filtered-out context information with the artificial context information considered appropriate by its user. The benefit of this new approach is that people who are accessing the filtered context information cannot detect if the context information has been filtered, i.e., filtering becomes imperceptible. Based on this new approach, we have designed, implemented, and conducted preliminary evaluation of the DoCoDeMo phone, which allows a user to imperceptibly conceal his/her surrounding ambient sound from the callers, without the callers knowing the presence of filtering.