Challenges in Retaining Privacy in Smart Spaces

Advances in mobile computing, sensors, controls, ubiquitous networking, and other indoor automation infrastructure enable buildings to operate more intelligently, providing improved energy efficiency, safety, convenience, and quality of life. However, many features of these “smart spaces” require sensing, aggregation, analysis, and storage of potentially sensitive information about room occupants. The privacy of the information manipulated by smart spaces quickly becomes a key barrier in realizing the full value of ambient systems and is the focus of this paper. We approach this challenge by first surveying current privacy definitions and mechanisms (access control, k-anonymity, and differential privacy) under the assumption of ambient sensors and networking found in smart spaces. We then identify how existing approaches are not suitable for smart spaces under major smart space privacy scenarios and propose adaptations with strong potential for addressing these scenarios. ∗In Proc. 4th Intl. Conf. on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, June 25–28, 2013, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Procedia Computer Science, Volume 19, 2013. This work was supported primarily by the Engineering Research Centers Program of the National Science Foundation under NSF Cooperative Agreement No. EEC-0812056.