Context sensitive privacy management in a distributed environment

Abstract

The paper presents a mechanism for privacy management developed for a distributed environment with the assumption that the nodes are subjected to severe resource constraints (processing power, memory). The basic idea is that the private data are filtered out in accordance with users' privacy policies before they become visible to other users. The decisions are highly localized which reduces the load related to privacy management on the computing nodes. The mechanism is hidden in middleware (the platform) and is transparent to the applications running on the nodes. The paper describes the problem and its solution in abstract terms and then presents the technical system which has been developed to demonstrate the proposed solution. © Springer-Verlag 2010.