Towards a Pervasive Formal Privacy Language

The pervasive computing systems are weaving themselves in our daily life, collecting private user information invisibly, which made privacy a major issue in these environments. The huge number of interactions between users and pervasive devices necessitate the mapping of user defined privacy policies into data level privacy policies which can be used by pervasive devices. These data level policies should follow the original human language format so the resulted data privacy policies can be reviewed by non-technical users assuring that machine level policies are following user defined privacy requirements. On the other hand the resulted policies should be able to precisely describe events, components and operations in the context of pervasive environments and proper judgments can be made based on these policies. In this paper we review previous languages and formats for describing privacy policies and analyzing them in the context of pervasive systems. We introduce a PERvasive FORmal (PERFORM) privacy language to map user privacy policies into data level policies. The PERFORM is capable of describing events and characteristics of pervasive environments. The proposed model would follow human judgment process in checking operations against privacy policies.