Consumer Privacy Enforcement in Context-Aware Web Services

Abstract

Privacy protection constitutes a genuine human right reflected both in the legislation and in different aspects of software engineering. Sensitive information needs to be protected in end-users interaction with Web Services especially in cases, where context-aware features are included. In this work the authors address the inclusion of consumer privacy preferences in the provision of context-aware Web Services. To achieve this the authors propose, on the one hand, a preferences language, where end-users can specify their privacy options, namely Consumer Privacy Language, and, on the other hand, a seamless enforcement mechanism that considers consumer preferences by intercepting and modifying appropriately Simple Object Access Protocol request and response messages. The enforcement approach has been evaluated based on various execution metrics for an example use case consisting of various Web Services and for different user configurations demonstrating the usefulness of the approach assisting towards the provision of privacy-aware environments.