Preserving User Privacy and Security in Context-Aware Mobile Platforms

Contemporary smartphones are capable of generating and transmitting large amounts of data about their users. Recent advances in collaborative context modeling combined with a lack of adequate permission model for handling dynamic context sharing on mobile platforms have led to the emergence of a new class of mobile applications that can access and share embedded sensor and context data. Most of the time such data is used for providing tailored services to the user but it can lead to serious breaches of privacy. We use Semantic Web technologies to create a rich notion of context. We also discuss challenges for context aware mobile platforms and present approaches to manage data flow on these devices using semantically rich fine-grained context-based policies that allow users to define their privacy and security need using tools we provide.