How a Pattern-based Privacy System Contributes to Improve Context Recognition

As Smart Devices have access to a lot of user-preferential data, they come in handy in any situation. Although such data—as well as the knowledge which can be derived from it—is highly beneficial as apps are able to adapt their services appropriate to the respective context, it also poses a privacy threat. Thus, a lot of research work is done regarding privacy. Yet, all approaches obfuscate certain attributes which has a negative impact on context recognition and thus service quality. Therefore, we introduce a novel access control mechanism called PATRON. The basic idea is to control access to information patterns. For instance, a person suffering from diabetes might not want to reveal his or her unhealthy eating habit, which can be derived from the pattern “rising blood sugar level” “adding bread units”. Such a pattern which must not be discoverable by some parties (e. g., insurance companies) is called private pattern whereas a pattern which improves an app's service quality is labeled as public pattern. PATRON employs different techniques to conceal private patterns and, in case of available alternatives, selects the one with the least negative impact on service quality, such that the recognition of public patterns is supported as good as possible.