Client-side profile storage

Abstract

As Internet users, we provide personal information to a growing number of service providers with little or no control over its usage, and no means to properly track subsequent access of this information. Some companies have recently made announcements proposing to handle our personal information centrally, offering the possibility of a unified repository, but raising additional trust and privacy concerns. We have chosen to investigate an alternative to this trend by storing personal information on client devices, increasing the possibility of putting the user in control of his or her personal information. A user can have multiple heterogeneous devices, so this generates a need for the distribution of profile data. We report on work that addresses this distribution issue using a coherency protocol well adapted to handle data migration, and are extending this protocol to incorporate trust-related features. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.