A comparative study of privacy mechanisms and a novel privacy mechanism [short paper]

Abstract

Privacy of PII(Personally Identifiable Information) on the Internet is a major concern of a netizen. On the Internet different service providers are supposed to publish their own privacy policies but understanding of these policies is a major problem. Standards like Platform for Privacy Preferences(P3P), provide a computer readable format and a protocol for allowing web browsers to retrieve and process privacy policies. In this paper we studied the various privacy mechanisms in place and compared them on the basis of their architecture and third party intervention. We also proposed an alternative privacy mechanism that introduces the concept of a third party whose role is to verify the privacy policy and keep a proactive check on the use of specified PII's. In case of a violation the third party, informs the users of the breach. The implementation of the proactive check on the PII has been done through software agents. The requirement of granting legal status to transactions of the PII by the use of Digital Signatures and PKI has also been proposed,thereby legally binding the web entity to use the PII as per the agreed terms. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.