Privacy Invasions in Ubiquitous Computing 

Marc Langheinrich Institute for Pervasive Computing ETH Zurich 8092 Zurich, 
Switzerland 

Abstract. While recent surveys often cite people who have experienced some 
form of privacy invasion, the exact nature of such invasions remains elusive. 
Yet in order to build ubiquitous computing systems that will respect the 
privacy of the individual, it is crucial to understand when it is exactly that 
people feel their privacy has been invaded. This paper motivates why privacy 
is necessary, describes an approach called privacy boundaries that tries to 
capture the various reasons a certain flow of personal information is 
perceived threatening, and looks briefly at how ubiquitous computing 
intensifies these problems.