Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence

Intelligent devices embedded everywhere and interconnected with always-on capability enable new services and applications to emerge but also greatly magnify the risk of abuse of the exchanged data. This article presents the need to develop safeguards in order to protect valuable assets if society at large is to benefit from AmI. Since the challenge lies in identifying safeguards for threats and vulnerabilities that are yet to be defined, the dark scenarios developed by the SWAMI project (safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence), can be presented as a tool to help illustrate risks that need to be mediated if AmI is to be a future success story and against which safeguards need to be drawn