Context-based privacy management of personal information using semantic desktop: SemanticLIFE case study

Advancement in Web Services has revolutionarized the way data is accessed and shared on the Web. Web Services are the new emerging means for efficient communication and information exchange. In the past, there was no proper means for communication and organizations used to exchange data without any proper medium which would give birth to privacy and security. This leads us to develop a system which is secure and trustworthy for the end-user. Personal Web Services (PWS) is the new emerging field which provides user with high level of personalization e.g. a person traveling to Austria can use his/her handheld device to locate nearby restaurants, tourist places, accommodation, medical stores and transportation system etc. Personalized services are based on the user profile which contains user preferences (what he/she likes and dislikes, interests, behavior in different situations), considered as sensitive data. To acquire any service, the requester has to disclose personal information (e.g. name, address, phone number, present location etc) to utilize that service. The most important of them is the user context, i.e. location. Misuse of user's sensitive and other identifiable information could lead to threat to user privacy. While negotiating with the service provider, the user gives away important information, but what does not realize is that disclosing this information could be a threat to his/her privacy. The service provider could share this important information with third parties or could use it for commercial reasons. In a collaborative environment, it is necessary that unauthorized people should not have access to sensitive information. In this paper we propose a solution to empower the end-user to selectively control who has access to their contextual information and under which conditions based on ontologies using SemanticLIFE's Personal Services. SemanticLIFE is a personal information management system which manages and retrieves the lifetime's information while giving annotations to emails, browsed Web pages, phone calls, images, contacts and other resources of individuals. It enables the acquisition and storage of data in ontological form in semantic store. Each source of contextual information is represented as Personal Web Service.