Masks: bringing anonymity and personalization together

Abstract

ost Web users realize that sites are collecting information about them, though few realize how much data is gathered or how that gathering occurs. Although some companies publish privacy policies to inform users about their practices, most policy statements are full of technical and legal jargon and are difficult to understand. Further, the Pew Internet & American Life Project's privacy survey 1 revealed that, although US users are anxious about having their activities monitored, only 5 percent use tools to "anonymize" their requests, and only 10 percent reject cookies. Still other surveys (see, for example, www.pandab.org/ doubleclicksummary.html) have found that users have a strong desire for personalization, which enhances services by customizing sites to users needs-but also requires sites to gather data to that end. 2 To bridge these conflicting needs, we developed Managing Anonymity while Sharing Knowledge to Servers, 3 a Web-based framework that balances users' privacy concerns during Web browsing activities with their desire for personalized Web services. Masks uses a selective revelation scheme that erects an anonymity barrier between the user's private data and Web services, and controls the information that flows across that barrier to the service. This kind of filtering minimizes user information exposure while still permitting some form of service personalization. Also, because it addresses privacy at the data-collection level, Masks prevents third parties from building user profiles based on links to sites and information that might reveal personal information, such as religion, travel preferences, sexual orientation, and so on. Privacy lected about them without consent-is a product of how they view privacy.

Enhancing privacy and preserving accuracy of a distributed collaborative filtering

“…Several methods of modifying the data for improving privacy preservation of users' sensitive data were discussed in [7]. They include encryption, access-control policies, randomization, and anonymization.…”

Masks: Managing Anonymity While Sharing Knowledge to Servers

“…This section describes MASKS (Managing Anonymity while Sharing Knowledge to Servers) [Ishitani et al , 2003] (Figure 1), a Web-based framework that offers users a privacy-preserving mechanism, through anonymity. Unlike other anonymity tools, it allows some degree of personalization, for it discloses data that can be used by Web sites to provide personalized services, without profiling each individual user.…”

“…• Cover of a broader view of privacy protection -considering the six layers of privacy protection (awareness, control, privacy-enhancing tools, privacy policy, privacy and trust certification and privacy protection laws) [Ishitani et al , 2003], MASKS is the only architecture we know that implements the first three layers.…”

Privacy protection without impairing personalization by using the extended system MASKS and the extended contextualized P3P privacy policies

“…A taxonomy [9], [10] is utilized to classify these tools and techniques into different privacy layers. According to this classification, no tool approaches all the protection layers.…”