Privacy-enhanced personalisation in ambient environments

In ambient environments both quantity and quality of context-aware, personalizable information will continuously increase. Acceptance and benefit will depend on personalization technologies which enable end-users to protect their privacy. However, starting from the experience how users, service providers and network operators nowadays take advantage of personalised services the authors deplore inadequate and intransparent control mechanisms for end-users in current platforms and implementations. The introduction of a structured approach in this paper to privacy requirements engineering helps analysing and identifying threats and challenges in future ambient scenarios. The paper promotes privacy-enhancing technologies, such as user empowerment, user-centric identity management, as well as pseudonyms and client-side personalization and gives an overview on legal requirements.