Preserve Your Privacy with PCO: A Privacy Sensitive Architecture for Context Obfuscation for Pervasive E-Community Based Applications

Abstract: Context awareness is just beginning to revolutionize the ways we interact with networked devices. In order for context awareness to flourish, especially in a pervasive environment, users must be certain that their privacy is respected. Privacy in pervasive online community depends on the level of granularity of the provided information, user’s relation to possible recipients, and the possible usage of user’s data. Conventional privacy preservation techniques are not suitable for these pervasive applications. The notion of this paper is to present the preliminary results of using a unique architecture of obfuscation techniques to preserve users’ privacy in e-community based applications. This paper describes our current work in developing a novel Privacy-sensitive architecture for Context Obfuscation (PCO) for privacy preservation in pervasive online community based applications. More specifically, PCO safeguards a user’s privacy by generalizing the contextual data (e.g. the user’s current activity) provided to the applications and distributed to the user’s peers. To support multiple levels of granularity for the released contextual data, the obfuscation procedure uses an ontological description that states the granularity of object type instances. We have developed and evaluated a contextual instant messaging application (PCO application) in Android platform that incorporates level-based privacy of the user’s contextual information. We also evaluate our prototype application through user evaluation survey.