Disappearing For A While - Using White Lies In Pervasive Computing

The pervasive nature of future living environments, saturated with sensors and context-detecting services, pose a completely new challenge for computer science: the art of virtual disappearance. In many situations individuals do not want to be tracked by the environment and do not want their whereabouts to be known publicly or even by their friends and relatives. Today's technology often allows us to use white lies in such circumstances. The question we pose in this paper is: Can we achieve the same using pervasive computing technologies? In this paper we show how our User-centric Privacy Framework can be extended to allow users to pro-actively use white lies as a means to disguise their location or activity without sacrificing the use of context-services as a whole. As a result we are confident that also in the future we can perform some magic: disappearing for a while - when needed.