From gadget to gadget-free hyperconnected world : conceptual analysis of user privacy challenges

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>Currently, gadgets are the most common and frequent ways of acquiring digital services. However, due to recent advancements in smart sensing and communication technologies, it seems that, this trend might get change in coming days. Future is hinting us towards a gadget-free hyperconnected society, where each object can sense, gather and process the information and can be able to take context based decisions. The vision behind this novel concept is to provide users, digital services anywhere and anytime, without using explicit gadgets or even wearables. Smart surrounding will be able to provide digital services to users according to their requirements. Also with the addition of 5G technology, this vision will get more strengthen and thus novel services will come into action. This will generate massive amount of critical data and eventually dealing with privacy in such ambient and gadget-free environment will be one of the major concerns for users. Therefore, this paper presents privacy challenges from user’s perspectives, that can potentially arise in such gadget-free environment. An initial and tentative conceptual privacy framework is also discussed in the light of the user’s privacy issues. Furthermore, we provide an overview of transformation requirements needed in transition from the gadget to gadget-free world.</p></div>