Digital Living: Understanding PLACE - Privacy in Location-Aware Computing Environments

Project Summary: Digital technology plays an increasing role in everyday life, and this trend is only accelerating. Consider daily life five years from now, in 2010: we will each be surrounded by far more digital devices, mediating far more activities in our work, home, and play; the boundary between cyberspace and physical space will fade as sensors and actuators allow computers to be aware of, and control, the physical environment; and the devices in our life become increasingly (and often invisibly) interconnected with each other and with the Internet. Today, typical home users struggle to maintain the security of their home computer, and have difficulty managing their privacy online. Tomorrow, these challenges may become unimaginably complex. This 18-month project studies, and begins to address, the security and privacy challenges involved in developing this world of Digital Living in 2010.

Specifically, this project focuses on the advent of sensor networks, and their applications in the home and work environment. Although sensor networks have been an active area of academic research, and are becoming commercially available for deployment in industrial settings, sensor networks will soon have many uses in enterprise and residential settings. People will live in spaces, or work with devices, that have embedded sensing capability. For people to accept this new technology into their lives, they must be able to have confidence that the systems work as expected, and do not pose unreasonable threats to personal privacy.

This confidence results from a variety of technical and organizational mechanisms. This project delves into the sociological underpinnings of privacy and trust in digital living, into the technological foundations for secure and robust sensor networks, and into mechanisms for users to express control over information about their activity.

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