Managing user expectations & privacy in the age of context awareness

Pervasive computing applications often have to deal with end user privacy concerns due to continuous user action monitoring and cloud to client data communications. Because of the complexity of many context aware systems, users may also have difficulties estimating privacy implications of their actions and decisions. We propose a novel approach of client/standalone context aware engine with no cloud communication to offer a broad range of data sensing, processing, classification and actionable capabilities without requiring any data transfer from client to cloud. This client only model relieves user privacy concerns and offers a better way to manage battery and data costs involved with cloud communications. We present an extensible model in which proliferation of Internet of things can leverage a combination of client - cloud capabilities to perform context aware actions without infringing on user privacy.