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Top1. Introduction
Mobile and pervasive computing refers to the paradigm that information and communication technologies (ICT) become seamlessly embedded into everyday’s life and work activities and processes in manifold aspects (Satyanarayanan, 2001). ICT research communities have recognized the huge potential of applying such post-desktop computing approaches to emergency response settings in order to improve crucial processes (Jiang et al., 2004; Flentge et al., 2008; Fischer et al., 2010; Smirnov et al., 2011). While representing a new area of technological development that brings new opportunities, at the same time mobile and pervasive computing is associated to new risks. In particular, the interwoven security and privacy issues are often mentioned as major obstacles towards the real world deployment of pervasive systems (Cas, 2005; Dritsas, 2006).
In order to become acceptable and trustworthy, mobile and pervasive ICT should be integrated into application scenarios in a systematic manner. In particular, it is most important that all actors and stakeholders who are involved in ICT-supported processes are able to clearly perceive the vision and rationale for the introduction of new technologies. Especially with regards to privacy, every new technology increases complexity problems. Moreover, since privacy protection is also in conflict with the protection goal of accountability, it requires a particularly thorough assessment.
The approach presented in this paper reflects that, in order to be successful, also the involved organizations need to have an accurate understanding of how new technologies may fit into the application context and how they can be integrated into a broader framework, which is driven both by organizational goals and by end users. Privacy and security requirements are always embedded in an organization; therefore they should be analyzed and elicited as thoroughly as other system requirements during the development of information systems. Also, organizational and technical design issues are interrelated. In particular, an information system cannot function in isolation from the whole enterprise system in which it is embedded in (Nuseibeh & Easterbrook, 2000). Therefore, all the aspects of the system including static aspects (related to data and information), dynamic aspects (related to process and interaction) as well as security and privacy aspects should be maintained and controlled throughout the system development life cycle, from early stages of system planning activities up to design and implementation stage. As security and privacy concerns much about what kind, to which extent and for which purpose certain data and digital information should be collected, stored and shared among different actors, it is very important that the analysis of the actual usage of data takes place at the very early stage of requirement determination. In turn, an appropriate analysis method can also contribute to data minimization, which is one of the most important design goals concerning security and privacy.
In this article, we consider emergency response as a particular challenging application scenario, which benefits form a thorough elicitation of privacy and security requirements. In particular, we analyze:
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How mobile and pervasive ICT may enhance the cooperation between emergency workers in a control center and the entities in the field respectively at the incident site;
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To which extent security and privacy protection goals have to be considered to achieve multilateral security, i.e. security that fairly balances conflicting security requirements.