A private Intelligent Shopping Mall

In this paper we extend a previous recent work on Ambient Intelligence, deployed into a scenario of Intelligence Shopping Malls, with a privacy layer. In fact nowadays, in the Ambient Intelligence context, privacy issues are more and more considered an urgent and main issue to take care of. The success of this permeated ubiquitous intelligence seems to be strongly correlated to how much the scenario is able to protect the privacy and the rights of the users. The Intelligence Shopping Mall is a physical environment for commerce equipped with sensors and actuators for supporting shoppers. These latters have a wish list of the items to buy. Once in the mall, the wish list should be disclosed to steer the shopper towards the right shop selling the wished item. Anyway, from shops' point of view, shopping lists contain valuable information about shoppers. Indeed, from shopping lists one could easily infer users' personal preferences or tendency (e.g., users' lifestyle) that could be used for marketing purpose. Hence, shopping lists could reveal shoppers' sensitive information. In this paper, to preserve the shoppers' privacy without limiting the possibility to guide users towards shops selling the sought products, we propose an efficient and efficacious privacy preserving protocol. Using such a protocol, shops can steer shoppers towards the shops selling the desired items without knowing the items in their shopping lists (excluding the items bought in the shop itself).