A Generic Privacy Enhancing Technology for Pervasive Computing Environments

Pervasive computing is an emerging computing paradigm, which is expected to be part of our everyday life in the foreseeable future. Despite its huge potential value, one can foresee considerable drawbacks and undesirable potential uses of it in terms of privacy. In specific, the pervasive computing paradigm raises the level of the challenge to protect privacy of end-users, mainly due to the fact that devices operating in such an environment will be embedded in the fabric of the everyday life and will exhibit enhanced tracking and profiling capabilities. What is needed, inter alia, is appropriate mechanisms that are able to evolve with the needs of the users and interact with them in order to meet their privacy requirements. In this paper we suggest the foundations of a new Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET), with respect to the basic characteristics and implications introduced by pervasive environments.