MASTERY: A multicontext-aware system that preserves the users' privacy

Users' privacy is a critical challenge for any information management system. The proliferation of mobile devices has promoted the use of context-aware solutions, making the protection of the users' information an even greater challenge. Addressing this requires a given mechanism that allows users to manage and control their personal information. In this sense, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving and context-aware system named MASTERY (Multicontext-Aware System That prEserves the useRs' privacY) that manages the privacy of the users' information in intra- and inter-context scenarios. MASTERY is a trusted third party that suggests to users a pool of privacy policies (profiles) aware to the context in which they are located, who can modify them according to their interests. These policies protect the privacy of the users' information being accessed from others without their consent. The information about users and contexts is managed by using semantic web techniques. This provides a common infrastructure that makes possible to represent, process, and share information between independent systems easily.