Design of a Context Privacy Service for Mobile Collaboration

Privacy related to context information is becoming an increasingly important issue due to the wide range of new applications using computational, location and personal context information. In this article, we propose a privacy service, called Context Privacy Service (CoPS), to control how, when and to whom disclose a user’s context information. In order to identify the end-user privacy concerns, we carried out a survey where we asked approximately 100 people about their willingness to use context-aware services and to disclose their context information. Based on the results of this survey and experience reported by other research groups, we identified the main service requirements and designed CoPS aiming flexibility, generality, simplicity and fine-grained privacy control. CoPS is supposed to aid the end-user to define and manage his privacy policies regarding his context information.