Our electronic society is making fast progress for offering users greater comfort in their daily activities. Users can benefit from fast access to services, better reactivity of their physical, computing and networking environments to their own needs and habits, and preselection of information flows and relationships they have interest in. Our digital society is eager to collect information for serving users as best as possible, but also to make profits by potentially selling the collected information. Profiling users is one usual marketing activity, but new lucrative applications based on the huge amount of available information are emerging, with total disregard to the privacy of the users.

There are a number of sources for collecting information like social networks, cloud computing, electronic transactions, RFID/NFC systems, biometrical applications... For users to keep confidence in computing systems and communication networks, and for making their basic privacy rights observed, there is a strong need to identify a framework covering the legal, economical, ethical, social and technical disciplines. Regulation is essential for authorities to approve that framework and give support for worldwide observability. Economy is also a key issue for users and providers negotiating the delivery of personal information vs the provision of a service at an acceptable price. Ethical and social aspects are also important, at least to identify how confidence can be best provided back to users. Finally, methods are fundamental for enforcing this framework through privacy-by-design, and in-depth knowledge of privacy threats.

Given the recent events reported by the media, the growing requirements of users for privacy, and the lack of privacy-aware framework, Annals of Telecommunications is organizing a Special Issue on these topics. The objectives of this Special Issue are twofold: first, research and implementation experiences, and experiments; second, novel research contributions addressing privacy issues under the technical viewpoint and one among the legal, economical, ethical or social viewpoint.


The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Economics of privacy;
- Human factors in privacy;
- Legal and ethical issues;
- Privacy by design;
- Privacy enhancing technologies;
- Privacy in networks, and services;
- Privacy in smart grids, and cloud computing;
- Privacy in social applications and networks;
- Privacy models;
- Privacy threats.


Guest Editors:
- Maryline Laurent, Telecom SudParis, France, (Maryline . Laurent at telecom-sudparis . eu)
- Sara Foresti, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
- Heng Xu, Pennsylvania State University, USA


Submissions:
The manuscript must be in English and comprise between 5,000 and 8,500 words (30,000 to 50,000 characters including spaces). They must describe original research not published or currently under review by other journals or conferences. Submissions should be sent according to the editorial procedure described in the instructions available at:
http://www.annals-of-telecommunications.com/p_en_publish_6.html


Schedule:
- Manuscript submission: October 31st, 2012
- Expected publication: September-December 2013