Abstract. Personal Information Management (PIM) systems aim to provide convenient access to all data and metadata on a desktop to the user itself as well as the co-workers. Obviously, sharing desktop data with co-workers raises privacy and access control issues which have to be addressed. In this paper we discuss these issues, and present appropriate solutions. In line with the architecture of current PIM systems [8, 2, 11, 15], our solutions cover all semantic data shared in such a context, i.e. all desktop resources as well as other data structures created by the system, such as metadata in an RDF store and inverted index entries created for efficient textual search. We discuss different kinds of policies to specify protection for desktop data and metadata, and describe our access control system to express and execute these policies efficiently. Additionally, we describe the extension of an existing PIM system, Beagle++, with our approach, as well as our experiments, with convincing...