TURP: Managing Trust for Regulating Privacy in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as smart home or ambient-assisted living systems, promise useful services to end users. Most of these services rely heavily on sharing and aggregating information among devices, many times raising privacy concerns. Contrary to traditional systems, where privacy of each user is managed through well-defined policies, the scale, dynamism, and heterogeneity of the IoT systems make it impossible to specify privacy policies for all possible situations. Alternatively, this article argues that handling of privacy has to be reasoned by the IoT devices, depending on the norms, context, as well as the trust among entities. We present a technique, where an IoT device collects information from others, evaluates the trustworthiness of the information sources to decide the suitability of sharing information with others. We demonstrate the applicability of the technique over an IoT pilot study.