Privacy enhancing technologies for solving the privacy-personalization paradox: Taxonomy and survey

Abstract

Personal data are often collected and processed in a decentralized fashion, within different contexts. For instance, with the emergence of distributed applications, several providers are usually correlating their records, and providing personalized services to their clients. Collected data include geographical and indoor positions of users, their movement patterns as well as sensor-acquired data that may reveal users' physical conditions, habits and interests. Consequently, this may lead to undesired consequences such as unsolicited advertisement and even to discrimination and stalking. To mitigate privacy threats, several techniques emerged, referred to as Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PETs for short. On one hand, the increasing pressure on service providers to protect users' privacy resulted in PETs being adopted. One the other hand, service providers have built their business model on personalized services, e.g. targeted ads and news. The objective of the paper is then to identify which of the PETs have the potential to satisfy both usually divergent -economical and ethical -purposes. This paper identifies a taxonomy classifying eight categories of PETs into three groups, and for better clarity, it considers three categories of personalized services. After defining and presenting the main features of PETs with illustrative examples, the paper points out which PETs best fit each personalized service category. Then, it discusses some of the inter-disciplinary privacy challenges that may slow down the adoption of these techniques, namely: technical, social, legal and economic concerns. Finally, it provides recommendations and highlights several research directions.

Hands off my data: users’ security concerns and intention to adopt privacy enhancing technologies

“…The term Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) covers a broad range of technologies and applications that are designed to enhance privacy and data security of both individual (e.g. Kaaniche et al 2020) and corporate users (e.g. Gan et al 2019) in their online activities and communications.…”

“…On these premises, it is no wonder that the market of the so called 'Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET), i.e. a wide and heterogeneous family of information and communication technologies (ICTs) designed to reduce, eliminate, or prevent unauthorized processing of users' personal data to protect their privacy and security (Heurix et al 2015;Borking and Raab 2001) such as proxy servers, virtual private networks (VPNs), end-to-end secure communications, and anonymization networks like The Onion Router (known as Tor), have recently gained momentum (Kaaniche et al 2020;Sardá et al 2019).…”

An Efficient User-Centric Consent Management Design for Multiservices Platforms

“…However, many shortcomings of user-centric PII management within TCPA have been identified over the previous years in Chapter 1.2.2 in [3]. e problem of the reunification of personal data has been well identified in the literature in Chapter IV in [4] and remains relevant.…”

“…e problem of the reunification of personal data has been well identified in the literature in Chapter IV in [4] and remains relevant. In fact, academic and industrial solutions, either they be (i) personal data stores [5][6][7][8], (ii) identity managers [9][10][11][12][13], (iii) anonymous certificate systems [3,14,15], or (iv) delegation architecture [16,17], do not address the specific needs of PII management within TCPA. Indeed, (i) personal data stores only support simple PII management scenarios where PII is collected on an "all-ornothing" basis.…”

PriADA: Management and Adaptation of Information Based on Data Privacy in Public Environments

“…The privacy and security in mobile information systems are essential because the mobile devices are equipped with several sensors that may capture sensitive data related to the user, such as location, previous communications, and other sensors data capable of identifying the different users [6,7]. Still, the privacy of the users is always crucial in the different developed systems.…”