A Formal Privacy System and its Application to Location Based Services
Published in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 04), 2004
There are a variety of well-known models for access control developed for purposes like formally modeling the access rights on files, databases, and web resources. However, the existing models provide an inadequate representation of a number of concepts that are important when modeling privacy rights in distributed systems. We present an analog of the access control matrix designed to model such concepts. Our formalism, which we call a privacy system, empashizes the management of data and actions that affect the privacy of subjects. We motivate privacy systems, describe them mathematically, and illustrate their value in an architecture based on Personal Digital Rights Management (PDRM), which uses DRM concepts as a foundation for the specification and negotiation of privacy rights. This illustration is carried out throuh a case study of a privacy-respecting system for location based services. Our prototype, which we call AdLoc, manages advertising interupts on PDAs based on their location as determined by WiFi sightings in accordance with contracts written in the DRM language XrML.
Recommended citation: Carl A. Gunter, Michael J. May, and Stuart Stubblebine. A Formal Privacy System and its Application to Location Based Services, in 2004 Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET). Toronto, Canada, 2004.
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