Partial Identities

The concept of Identity Management in PICOS enables users to manage their identity-related information in a convenient way. Users can create multiple Partial Identities. Each of these identities is represented by an own profile, which contains personal information about the user. The identities may be used in different usage contexts. This can help users to represent their real-life roles and contexts (e.g. work, family, friends) within the community. When participating in different Sub-Communities, Partial Identities support users also in hiding and revealing relations between various personal information.

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Sub-Communities

PICOS offers users tools for managing the privacy of their personal information on different levels of detail. Sub-Communities represent dedicated areas for community members, where they can discuss and exchange information. Each Sub-Community can have multiple members. By founding a Sub-Community, users can decide if they want to make the sub-community public or private. In the latter case the founders can decide who is allowed to be a member of that Sub-Community. Information (e.g. discussion topics) and content (e.g. pictures) published in such a private sub-community are only accessible by its members. Sub-Communities allow users to exchange content within limited groups of users. Thereby Sub-Communities help users to manage personal content in a convenient and differentiated manner.

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Private Rooms

By means of Private Rooms users are enabled to have a personal area for managing their private information and content. By default, all content of a users private room is accessible only for the user. This allows him to store and manage personal content but also to selectively publish such private content to a certain set of other users, in case it is needed. E.g. if pictures from a current holiday trip should be made available to some close friends at home. The concepts thereby contributes to the PICOS approach to give users more freedom and control over their personal information and content.

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Blurring

For mobile services especially location and context information is of high interest. Such information allows enhanced and new services, to be personalised along the current context of the user in order to better adress his (potential) needs. Such services are already used in mobile communities, e.g. in form of friend locators or mobile shopping recommendations, and could be very helpful tools.

However, usually users are only able to decide between providing their exact location for such services or not (e.g. to be displayed on a map for buddies). The PICOS concept of Blurring gives users the opportunity to hide their exact position, by obfuscating it on a location map, in a previously defined radius. Thereby users are enabled to decide to which degree their location is revealed.

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Privacy Policies

The PICOS community prototype enables users to selectively define policies in order to control who is allowed to see certain personal information. These policies are built on rules that are also taking into consideration context information. A user is enabled to define, for each Partial Identity which information regarding presence, location or profile is accessible by other users within the community. Privacy Policies may also be defined for specific sub-communities. The policies are an important mean to specify precisely, who is allowed to have access to personal information of a user and thereby to support pro-active identity management.

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Privacy Advisor

The Privacy Advisor (PA) is an innovative tool which guides users with regard to privacy and identity management related aspects. The Privacy Advisor accompanies the user and can give recommendations or warnings in case the user is about to disclose personal information. E.g. the Privacy Advisor might warn a user who is about to disclose information, like the telephone number or post code in a forum post. The Privacy Advisor thereby helps to create awareness for privacy related aspects within mobile communities, based on the user´s current behavior and context. We preceive such awareness as an essential pre-condition for the acceptance and active use of privacy enhancing technologies within communities.

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