A Proposal for Evaluating the Privacy Management through “Fair Trade” Metaphor Abraham ESQUIVEL a,1 , Pablo A. HAYA b and Xavier ALAM ´ AN c a Instituto Tecnol´ ogico Superior Zacatecas Norte, M´ exico. b Instituto de Ingenier´ıa del Conocimiento, Universidad Aut´ onoma de Madrid, Spain. c Universidad Aut´ onoma de Madrid, Spain. Abstract. This article presents a proposal for evaluating a privacy mechanism in pervasive environments. These environments are capable of sensing personal infor- mation anywhere and at anytime. This implies a risk to privacy that might not be as- sumed if a clear and trustable privacy management model is not provided. We have devised a privacy solution dealing with user’s privacy as a tradable good for obtain- ing environment’s services. Thus, users gain access to more valuable services as they share more personal information. This strategy, combined with optimistic ac- cess control and transactions registries mechanisms, enhances users’ confidence in the system while encouraging them to share their information, with the consequent benefit for the community. Keywords. Privacy, pervasive computing environments. Introduction Pervasive computing is an emerging field of research with everyday growing possibilities over active environments. Initially, most problems found in pervasive environments ap- peared in technical areas. Several research projects have been oriented on that direction. In particular, great efforts have been made to accomplish a seamless integration between devices operating in such environments [1]. Although technological achievements in this area have been of outstanding importance, social factors will also be key roles in the success or failure of pervasive environments. In this sense, a ma jor step in leveraging such environments comes from overcoming their ethical and psychological issues [2]. In fact, ethical and psychological problems are not strictly from pervasive environments and can be found in many software applications involving social interaction e.g. instant messengers or shared calendars. Clearly, the use of such applications entails new social problems, in particular those concerning user privacy. Privacy is a dynamic phenomenon; its configuration has as many variations as vari- ations has context i.e. a single change on context can trigger a change on privacy prefer- 1 Corresponding Author: Abraham Esquivel, Instituto Tecnol´ ogico Superior Zacatecas Norte, M´ exico; E- mail: abraham.esquivel@gmail.com Workshop Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments J.A. Botía et al. (Eds.) IOS Press, 2012 © 2012 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-080-2-425 425