Performance Evaluation of a Privacy-Enhancing Framework for Personalized Websites

Abstract

Abstract. Reconciling personalization with privacy has been a continuing interest in the user modeling community. In prior work, we proposed a dynamic privacy-enhancing user modeling framework based on a software product line architecture (PLA). Our system dynamically selects personalization methods during runtime that respect users' current privacy preferences as well as the prevailing privacy laws and regulations. One major concern about our approach is its performance since dynamic architectural reconfiguration during runtime is usually resource-intensive. In this paper, we describe four implementations of our system that vary two factors, and an in-depth performance evaluation thereof under realistic workload conditions. Our study shows that a customized version performs better than the original PLA implementation, that a multi-level caching mechanism improves both versions, and that the customized version with caching performs best. The average handling time per user session is less than 0.2 seconds for all versions except the original PLA implementation. Overall, our results demonstrate that with a reasonable number of networked hosts in a cloud computing environment, an internationally operating website can use our dynamic PLA-based user modeling approach to personalize their user services, and at the same time respect the individual privacy desires of their users as well as the privacy norms that may apply.

Managing information for personal goals (vision)

“…International data privacy legislation reflects users' wishes for access to and control over their own data [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. One way that people seek a measure of control is to form a personal model, where they bring together information about themselves, within a software platform for which they are an authority.…”

USER PROFILE-BASED SERVICE DISCOVERY for eHEALTH

“…Both are tracked in central servers, which creates new privacy problems. According to literature (Kobsa, 2007;Wang and Kobsa, 2009;Wang, 2010), a significant number of people revealed their concern of disclosing personal data to the Internet. This implies that if users are not given guarantees of keeping their personal information secured, then they are not willing to disclose this kind of information.…”

The onion router: Understanding a privacy enhancing technology community

“…In order to protect users' information privacy, scholars from different fields have made an effort to conceptualize information privacy in a concrete way (Solove, ; Nissenbaum, ). Meanwhile, technologists have become dedicated to developing different technologies that protect users' privacy, which are known as Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) (Wang & Kobsa, ). The most widely adopted PET tool is Tor, the onion routing network that the U.S.…”