Trust and Privacy Permissions for an Ambient World

Abstract

TRUST AND PRIVACY PERMISSIONS FOR AN AMBIENT WORLDAmbient Intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will trust such systems and at the same time achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people's attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. This chapter describes recent research related to privacy and trust with regard to ambient technology. The method used in the study is described and findings discussed. INTRODUCTIONAmbient Intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions (cf Bohn et., 2005). Our own interest in trust and privacy predates this impending vision, but nonetheless holds a great deal of relevance there. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people's attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their concerns and ideas. This chapter documents the results of this study, and contextualises them through: 2• Considering the concept of AmI and ambient technology, and the social implications of AmI use.• Exploring relevant existing work in trust and privacy and discuss this in relation to ambient devices.• Presenting and discussing general user concerns and highlighting problems of exclusion.When trying to understand how trust and privacy issues are implicated in an ambient world focusing on purely technical approaches is not sufficient. In the e-commerce literature trust is well documented, traditionally emphasising the need to develop systems that appear trustworthy (e.g. Shneiderman, 2000). Bødker (2004) argues 'technical approaches seem to relate trust directly to the construction of secure systems, thereby implying that users are purely rational, economical actors.' In an ambient world eservices will be accessible anywhere, anytime. Therefore this chapter considers the social nature of trust and privacy with regard to ambient technology (see Egger 2003 for a review of trust in e-commerce).The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section, we comprehensively discuss the concept of privacy and its meaning in both physical and virtual worlds. Following this, we discuss the phenomenon of trust and how, in the AmI future, trust will remain a cornerstone of social interaction. The results, and implications for AmI, of our study are presented in section 3. We conclude with a discussion about what privacy and trust considerations might mean in the light of these results, and a preliminary set of guidelines for the design of AmI devices and technology that take these implications into account. 3The concept of Ambient Intelligence Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to the convergence of ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication, and interfaces that are ...

Biometric daemons

“…In this way, then, the daemon could come to act as a trust agent [7] helping its owner make decisions about who to trust with access, information, or data. In suggesting this, we are recognizing that the security tasks of the future are likely to be much more complex than the tasks of the present.…”