Preserving privacy in UbiCollab: Extending privacy support in a ubiquitous collaborative environment

Abstract

UbiCollab is a platform that supports the development of cooperative applications for collaboration in a ubiquitous environment. The platform enables entities of different types and technologies to work together and share a common set of resources. In a collaborative setting, trust is crucial for creating bonds between the different participants and the system. People using these kinds of systems need to feel secure and trust the system enough to give personal information away and feel that they can control the use of this gathered information. By personal information we mean name, title, email etc., but also location or type of task the user is performing within the system. This thesis explores multiple identities in ubiquitous collaboration, as a mechanism for improving the privacy of UbiCollab. The thesis also explores the building and displaying of a reputation from past collaborative experiences in connection with the different identities. To realize these mechanisms the system allows anonymous access to services by communicating through a privacy proxy. UbiCollab uses a privacy policy description engine that enables negotiation on how private data is gathered and used by the system. The different identities will be supplied with a set of preferences that describes what actions the system is allowed to perform on their personal data. This provides a way to give the user control over the gathering and sharing of personal information. The policy description is based on an adaptation of the P3P standard, designed to suit policy descriptions in a service-based architecture. Privacy extensions to the existing or new services will be easily performed by adding a reference to where the policies can be found. As a counterpart to the P3P policies, the P3P Preference Exchange Language (APPEL) has been incorporated into the platform to allow the users a way to post their privacy preferences. The adapted API has been redefined to better suit the development of UbiCollab applications. The resulting prototype demonstrates the use of these privacy mechanisms and their value to the UbiCollab platform.