Note: This text is from Filipe Farinha’s thesis presented for the Master in Information Technology in the Faculty of Creative Industries University of Saint Joseph, Macau.

In a world where for-profit enterprises are increasingly looking to maximize profits by engaging in privacy invading consumer-profiling techniques, the rise of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) poses a major  privacy problem. If not acted upon quickly, the combination of Big Data with IoT will explode into a dystopian world that even George Orwell could not have predicted.

The proposed project aims to fill a gap that no other solution is addressing, which is to reach a win-win scenario that works for both the enterprises and the consumers. It aims to do this by creating the building blocks for a consumer owned infrastructure that can provide both privacy for the user, and still enable the enterprises to achieve their high-level goals.