Masks: Managing Anonymity While Sharing Knowledge to Servers

Abstract

This work presents an ar chitecture that allows users to enha nce their pri vacy control over t he com putational environment . Web pr ivacy is a topic that is raising, nowad ays, many discussions. Usu ally, peopl e do not know how their privacy can be violated or what ca n be done to protect it. Among the gener ated conllicts, we would like to show up t he one that happens between privacy and personalization: by one sid e, users appreciate the idea of receiving personalized services a nd do not a pprove the collection , tracing and an alysis of their ac tions; by the other side, personalization se rvices need this type of informa tion in order to profile their users . The a rchitec t ure presented in this a rt icle helps users to understand better how their privacy ca n be invaded and, a t the same time, gives them a better cont rol of their privacy, through anonymit y, without preventing them from receiving personalized services.

Increasing User’s Privacy Control through Flexible Web Bug Detection

“…A privacy policy is a set of rules that are obeyed by the site's organization with respect to gathering and using personal information [10]. Towards a privacy policy standard, W3C proposed a protocol known as P3P [21], but there is still no assurance that Web sites will behave according to their policies.…”

“…Each mask reflects one of various user interests when interacting with a Web site [15]. An architecture that implements such strategy is MASKS [10]. This architecture guarantees privacy by anonymizing user navigation and provides a level of personalization by binding pseudonyms to groups, instead of users individually.…”

“…The HTTP request header of each object is scanned by the Detector (9) to check if it uses a cookie (property 3 is verified here). After this scanning, the HTTP requests of these objects are forwarded to the Web (10). HTTP responses to these requests are obtained from the Web to be finally delivered to the browser (11).…”

“…Although each user may have his/her own privacy concept, we may define privacy in the information age as the right of individuals to protect their ability to selectively reveal information about themselves [10]. On the other hand, the information gathered about users is becoming more and more valuable as both market data and personalization resource, explaining the development of novel mechanisms and the interest of organizations and service providers in exploiting them.…”

“…Such mechanisms are associated to third party cookies and gather users' personal information without consent, which characterizes privacy invasion [10]. According to a previous study [8], about 3.91% of user HTTP requests contains Web Bugs.…”