Understanding privacy regulation in ubicomp interactions

Ubiquitous computing contains a huge promise for more intelligent services that are available anywhere and are able to dynamically adapt to the users’ current context. However, what necessarily follows such an environment is the compromising of the users’ privacy. We aim at analyzing this complex issue by applying and extending Altman’s theoretical privacy framework, well known in social sciences, to privacy in ubicomp. Altman understands privacy as a two-way interactive process, which makes the approach promising in analyzing ubicomp where people, devices and the environment interact with each other. We point out similarities between the existing model and the features of ubicomp environment, and verify the results by applying and analyzing the resulting extended framework to typical ubicomp use cases. Based on the analysis, we argue that privacy in ubicomp can be modeled similarly to privacy in general by extending the model to cover such factors as mediation and non-human actors.