E-commerce privacy policies tend to consist of many ambiguities in language that protects companies more than the customers. Types of ambiguities found are currently divided into four patterns: mitigation (downplaying frequency), enhancement (emphasizing nonessential qualities), obfuscation (hedging claims and obscuring causality), and omission (removing agents). A number of phrases have been identified as creating ambiguities within these four categories. When a customer accepts the terms and conditions of a privacy policy, words and phrases (from the category of mitigation) such as "occasionally" or "from time to time" actually give the e-commerce vendor permission to send as many spamming email offers as they deem necessary . Our study uses techniques based on Latent Semantic Analysis to discover the underlying semantic relations between words in privacy policies. Additional potential ambiguities and other word relations are found automatically. Words are clustered according to their topic in privacy policies using principal directions. This provides us with a ranking of the most significant words from each clustered topic as well as a ranking of the privacy policy topics. We also extract a signature that forms the basis of a typical privacy policy. These results lead to the design of a system used to analyze privacy policies called Hermes. Given an arbitrary privacy policy our system provides a list of the potential ambiguities along with a score that represents the similarity to a typical privacy policy.

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new technology that was proposed to improve separation of concerns in software development. AOP's main focus is to use aspect modules to implement concerns that would be generally scattered across the system and tangled with other modules (crosscutting concerns). Although much research has focused on AOP's application to traditional software development, little has been done towards its application to Web development. Aspect-oriented PHP (aoPHP) is an addition to PHP that allows the use of AOP in the Web development context. In this paper we describe an application of aoPHP to show that AOP can also be effectively used in the Web development context. In particular, we have implemented two crosscutting concerns in a collaborative Web system named CoTeia: the access control and the version control functionalities. Furthermore, we discuss how AOP can enhance the design of Web applications by reasoning on the refactored system.

This paper examines Christopher Alexander's Fifteen Fundamental Properties of Living Structures, and their relationship to the design of communication through website development. The Fifteen Properties are found to describe and provide solutions to a number of common quality problems in websites. In the spirit of design patterns, originated by Alexander, each Property is presented as part of a pattern describing a design problem in the website context, and its resolution through appropriate application of the Property.

We examine Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) as it applies to web development. XHTML was designed to separate form from content, a fundamental principle of separation of concerns in AOP. Cascading Stylesheets and Javascript naturally provide support for AOP. The release of AOPHP (Aspect-Oriented PHP) provides a more traditional way to implement AOP in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web development environment, weaving advice code into PHP source code prior to the PHP preprocessing step.