The Privacy Coach: Supporting customer privacy in the Internet of Things

TL;DR

The Privacy Coach is a mobile application that helps users make informed privacy decisions regarding RFID tags by mediating between user preferences and corporate policies, offering a user-friendly privacy support tool.

Contribution

It introduces a novel privacy support system that mediates between user preferences and corporate RFID privacy policies, differing from traditional RFID privacy tech.

Findings

Supports user privacy decision-making in RFID contexts

Provides a user-friendly interface for privacy management

Enables informed privacy choices through mediation

Abstract

The Privacy Coach is an application running on a mobile phone that supports customers in making privacy decisions when confronted with RFID tags. The approach we take to increase customer privacy is a radical departure from the mainstream research efforts that focus on implementing privacy enhancing technologies on the RFID tags themselves. Instead the Privacy Coach functions as a mediator between customer privacy preferences and corporate privacy policies, trying to find a match between the two, and informing the user of the outcome. In this paper we report on the architecture of the Privacy Coach, and show how it enables users to make informed privacy decisions in a user-friendly manner. We also spend considerable time to discuss lessons learnt and to describe future plans to further improve on the Privacy Coach concept.