A privacy framework for personal self-improving smart spaces

There are various critical privacy issues that need to be addressed in the majority of smart space environments. This paper elaborates on the design of a privacy protection framework for Personal Self-Improving Smart Spaces (PSSs), a concept introduced by the Persist project Consortium. Compared to other smart spaces, such as smart homes and vehicles, this new paradigm provides a truly ubiquitous and fully personalisable user-centric environment. However, the information that needs to be collected, processed and distributed in such an environment is by nature highly privacy-sensitive, as it includes user profile data and preferences, as well as data regarding the past, current and even future user activities and context in general. In this respect, the designed privacy framework aims to address all privacy issues that arise by providing facilities which support multiple digital identities of PSS owners and privacy preferences for deriving privacy policies based on the context and the trustworthiness of the third parties that interact with PSSs. © 2009 IEEE.