Environment Objects: A Novel Approach for Modeling Privacy in Pervasive Computing

Maintaining user privacy is a well-known challenge and obstacle to the acceptance of pervasive computing. Privacy has been researched from various perspectives by social science, legislative, and technological communities resulting in an information-centric approach that regulates of the collection and use of personal information. However, through the actuation of devices and objects in the user's physical environment, pervasive computing also introduces other significant challenges to a user's physical privacy. Our research introduces an environment-centric approach to modeling user privacy and regulating intrusions to physical privacy. We introduce four principles to guide the construction of physical privacy policies and demonstrate how existing information privacy models can be extended to address these aspects of physical privacy.