An app approach towards user empowerment in personalized service environments

Abstract

The laws of identity and privacy protection goals are major requirements of user-centric personalized service environments. The goal is that users can send master data, preferences, attributes and claims together with policies to relying parties such as Cloud Services Providers in order to control purpose, usage, and availability of personally identifiable information. In order to meet the requirements and to establish a trusted end point this paper introduces a virtual representation of a user called LifeApp that can be downloaded and installed by relying partners. On the one hand this approach aims at empowering the user to control access, enforce policies, minimize misusage and enjoy - nonetheless - personalized contextual services. On the other hand relying parties benefit from synchronizing data whenever it changes at the user's or the requester's side. The advantages are up-to-date and authentic user data, simplified customer relationship management, and if needed compliance to local data protection. The paper introduces the app approach to personalized service environments based on the Kantara-UMA protocol. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.