Privacy & Trust in Ambient Intelligence Environments

Privacy and trust are critical factors for the acceptance and success of next generation ambient intelligence environments. Those environments often act autonomously to support a user’s activity based on context information gathered from ubiquitous sensors. The autonomous nature, their accessibility to large amounts of personal information, and the fact that actuators and sensors are invisibly embedded in such environments, raise several privacy issues for participants. Those issues need to be addressed by adequate mechanisms for privacy protection and trust establishment. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) in the area of ambient intelligence environments and present the ATRACO approach to achieve privacy within those environments. Further, we will discuss how computational trust mechanisms and social trust aspects can be utilized to support privacy protection and the establishment of trust between system components and between the system and participants. After describing the integration of these mechanisms in the overall system architecture of ATRACO, we conclude by giving an outlook on future directions in this area.