Managing Personal Information Disclosure in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Ubiquitous computing stands to redefine established notions of pr ivacy as it introduces regular, pervasive sensing of personal information such as identity, location, and activity. To effectively and comfortably manage the disclosure of personal information, end-users will require a coherent conceptual model of privacy and convenient user interfaces to manage it. We describe a conceptual framework designed to support personal privacy management in ubiquitous computing by empowering users to adjust the precision of disclosed information. The framework relies on three key strategies: encapsulation, a priori configuration, and manual configuration. We describe a prototypical user interface built to instantiate this framework and we report the results of a formative evaluation of the framework. Results show our approach is superior to simple, automated disclosure paradigms but can be further refined.