Privacy-respecting location-based service infrastructures: A socio-technical approach to requirements engineering

Abstract

This article presents an approach for the design of location-based information systems that support privacy functionality. Privacy-enhancing technology (PET) has been available for a considerable amount of time. New online applications and infrastructures for mobile and ubiquitous use have been installed. This has been done without usage of available PET, although they are favored by data protection experts. Designers of location-based services (LBS) create infrastructures for business or application specific purposes. They have profit-oriented views on the rationale for PET deployment. Finally, users have requirements that might be neither on the PET community's nor on the business people's agenda. Many disciplines provide knowledge about the construction of community-spanning information systems. The challenge for designers of infrastructures and applications is to find a consensus that models all stakeholders' interests - and takes advantage all involved community's knowledge. This paper groups LBS stakeholders into a framework based onto a sociological knowledge construct called "boundary object". For this purpose, a taxonomical analysis of publications in the stakeholder communities is performed. Then the paper proposes a socio-technical approach. Its goal is to find a suitable privacy design for a LBS infrastructure based on the boundary object. Topics for further interdisciplinary research efforts are identified and proposed for discussion. © 2007 Universidad de Talca - Chile.