Privacy and User Trust in Context-Aware Systems

Context-aware systems (CAS) that collect personal information are a general trend. This leads to several privacy considerations, which we outline in this paper. We present as use-case the SWELL system, which collects information from various contextual sensors to provide support for well-being at work. We address privacy from two perspectives: 1) the development point of view, in which we describe how to apply ‘privacy by design’, and 2) a user study, in which we found that providing detailed information on data collection and privacy by design had a positive effect on trust in our CAS. We also found that the attitude towards using our CAS was related to personal motivation, and not related to perceived privacy and trust in our system. This may stress the importance of implementing privacy by design to protect the privacy of the user.