Privacy protection through unlinkability of customer activities in business processes using mobile agents

Abstract

Web technologies provide several means to infringe user privacy. This is especially true when customers with the intent to buy tangible goods submit their orders containing their real identity and physical address. Then in practice, the vendor can link this information with all information gathered about the customer beforehand, e.g., observation data on him while browsing through the product catalog. In this paper, we present a solution based on mobile agents that can be used to prevent the vendor from directly linking information gathered about the customer while searching with identifying information that is contained in the order. The system allows to introduce an agent delay at the agent base station which can increase the cardinality of the group of candidates to be linked to a product, and thereby to decrease the linking probability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.