Personal Privacy Management for Common Users

In this work, we introduce the Privacy Manager, a user interface designed to allow nonexpert users to manage privacy in the envisioned era of pervasive computing. The Privacy Manager is part of the implementation of the User-centric Privacy Framework, which was introduced as a novel mechanism to enable personal privacy for the inhabitants of the smart home. The Privacy Manager interface incorporates a set of application parts designed especially to meet the requirements of user friendliness, and privacy awareness, with the goal of making privacy management an affordable task for common users. Our first prototype allows to: i) customize permissions for the disclosure of their personal data, ii) control active and passive interactions with services, iii) define obligations to be negotiated on the usage of the data, upon transmission, iv) be aware of privacy related issues such as granted and denied permissions, v) apply alternative privacy mechanisms to access control, as white lying and obfuscation, vi) adhere to enterprise privacy policies based on a contractual relationship with an enterprise or organization. Providing people with tools to control their privacy is critical to guarantee the success of pervasive computing.