Collaborative Privacy – A Community-Based Privacy Infrastructure

Abstract

The landscape of the World Wide Web with all its versatile services heavily relies on the disclosure of private user information. Service providers collecting more and more of these personal user data pose a growing privacy threat for users. Addressing user concerns privacy-enhancing technologies emerged. One goal of these technologies is to enable users to improve the control over their personal data. A famous representative is the PRIME project that aims for a holistic privacy-enhancing identity management system. However, approaches like the PRIME privacy architecture require service providers to change their server infrastructure and add specific privacy-enhancing components. In the near future, service providers are not expected to alter internal processes. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative privacy community that allows the open exchange of privacy-related information. We lay out the privacy community’s functions and potentials within a user-centric, provider-independent privacy architecture that will help foster the usage and acceptance of privacy-enhancing technologies.