Abstract. Protecting personal privacy is going to be a prime concern for the deployment of ubiquitous computing systems in the real world. With daunting Orwellian visions looming, it is easy to conclude that tamper-proof technical protection mechanisms such as strong anonymization and encryption are the only solutions to such privacy threats. However, we argue that such perfect protection for personal information will hardly be achievable, and propose instead to build systems that help others respect our personal privacy, enable us to be aware of our own privacy, and to rely on social and legal norms to protect us from the few wrongdoers. We introduce a privacy awareness system targeted at ubiquitous computing environments that allows data collectors to both announce and implement data usage policies, as well as providing data subjects with technical means to keep track of their personal information as it is stored, used, and possibly removed from the system. Even though such a system cannot guarantee our privacy, we believe that it can create a sense of accountability in a world of invisible services that we will be comfortable living in and interacting with. It is undisputed that a future world full of smart and cooperating artifacts will pose great risks to our personal privacy: In an environment containing countless, invisible sensors that constantly monitor their surroundings and communicate their findings to each of their peers, both real-world and virtual transactions are certain to find their way into sheer limitless data storage systems, to be saved forever and recalled at a moment's notice. Much under discussion, however, is how to deal with this frightening vision. Should we give up on privacy as we know it today, and -at least potentially -make everybody see everything anytime [2]? Or should we instead try even harder to find the technological means that guarantee that our information stays private by employing state-of-the-art encryption and anonymization technology? Even though clever anonymization technology [10] can make tracing our digital identity almost impossible, and encryption schemes exist that seem to be sufficiently hard to break in the foreseeable future, personal privacy entails more than just secret communication and masked identity. Unless we want to abandon our current social interactions completely and deal only behind digital pseudonyms in virtual reality with each other, we must realize that our real-world presence cannot be completely hidden, nor perfectly anonymized. Neither can postal addresses or names stored in a database
To emphasise the proposed principles, Langheinrich REF proposes Privacy Awareness System in order to provide a sense of accountability, rather than to provide security and privacy guarantees, which is difficult to be achieved.
A Privacy Awareness System for Ubiquitous Computing Environments
Ubicomp
Computer Science