Sentry@Home - Leveraging the Smart Home for Privacy in Pervasive Computing

This article introduces a privacy framework for Smart Homes, supporting individuals roaming freely in pervasive computing environments. Such environments typically are equipped with different kinds of sensors and tracking devices for context-aware service provisioning. While on the one hand, people want to take advantage of the comfort and added value of personalized context-aware services, privacy and traceability becomes a serious concern on the other hand. The question arises, how we can build up trust into inherently untrusted services in a potentially hostile environment? How can it be guaranteed that eventually all sensitive data is deleted or safely stored away? The Sentry@HOME concept, as part of our User-centric Privacy Framework, addresses these concerns. It is designed to become an integral part of the user’s home environment; seamlessly embedded into the Smart Home software infrastructure.. The Smart Home itself then can be leveraged to act as a privacy proxy for a tracked individual. On behalf of the user it constitutes the central privacy enforcement point for all privacy-relevant accesses to private or sensitive data. We are confident that our contribution, the combination of Smart Homes and a privacy-aware infrastructure, substantially adds to the success of personalized pervasive computing systems.