Managing Pervasive Environment Privacy Using the "fair trade" Metaphor

This article presents a proposal for managing privacy in pervasive environments. These environments are capable of sensing personal information anywhere and at anytime. This implies a risk to privacy that might not be assumed if a clear and trustable privacy management model is not provided. However, since this kind of environments posses a set of highly heterogeneous sensing techniques, even basic privacy policies require a great management effort. Therefore, there is a tradeoff between providing automatic privacy configuration mechanisms and granting trustable privacy management models. Following the ”fairtrade” metaphor, this paper presents a privacy solution dealing with user’s privacy as a tradable good for obtaining environment’s services. Thus, users gain access to more valuable services as they share more personal information. This strategy, combined with optimistic access control and transactions registries mechanisms, enhances users’ confidence in the system while encouraging them to share their information, with the consequent benefit for the community.