Context-Based Reasoning on Privacy in Internet of Things

More and more, devices around us are being connected to each other in the realm of Internet of Things (IoT). Their communication and especially collaboration promises useful services to be provided to end users. However, the same communication channels pose important privacy concerns to be raised. It is not clear which information will be shared with whom, for which intents, under which conditions. Existing approaches to privacy advocate policies to be in place to regulate privacy. However, the scale and heterogeneity of the IoT entities make it infeasible to maintain policies among each and every entity in the system. Conversely, it is best if each entity can reason on the privacy using norms and context autonomously. Accordingly, this paper proposes an approach where each entity finds out which contexts it is in based on information it gathers from other entities in the system. The proposed approach uses argumentation to enable IoT entities to reason about their context and decide to reveal information based on it. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach over an IoT scenario.