Contemporary computers attempt to understand a user's actions and preferences in order to make decisions that better serve the user. In pursuit of this goal, computers can make observations that range from simple pattern recognition to listening in on conversations without the device being intentionally active. While these developments are incredibly useful for customization, the inherent security risks involving personal data are not always worth it. This thesis attempts to tackle one issue in this domain, computer usage identification, and presents a solution that identifies high-level usage of a system at any given moment without looking into any personal data. This solution, what I call "knowing without knowing," gives the computer just enough information to better serve the user without knowing any data that compromises privacy. With prediction accuracy at 99% and system overhead below 0.5%, this solution is not only reliable but is also scalable, giving valuable information that will lead to newer, less invasive solutions in the future.

This research has investigated how anonymity has been achieved in text-based online conversations. It has found that anonymity could be attained without any special provision from a conversation system. The absence of face-to-face contact and use of typed remarks are sufficient to create anonymity.Nevertheless, the lack of special provisions can make it difficult for some to use the anonymity they have attained. Preserving such naturally attained anonymity can be equally difficult for users. System administrators will also have trouble controlling anonymity without special provisions. Will deliberate provisions for anonymity remove these problems?The goal of this research is to determine how anonymity in online conversations could and should be supported. An existing conversation system lacking in special support for anonymity has been selected. Every possible change for the benefit of anonymity has been made to this system. The changes that have been made and why they were made are described in this thesis. The impact of those changes is also discussed. The final outcome of this research is a set of guidelines and standards for supporting anonymity in text-based online conversations.

Trust management is an important issue in the analysis and design of secure information systems. This is especially the case where centrally managed security is not possible. Trust issues arise not only in business functions, but also in technologies used to support these functions. There are a vast number of services and applications that must accommodate appropriate notions of trust. Trust and trust management have become a hot research area. The motivation of this dissertation is to build up a comprehensive trust management approach that covers the analysis/modelling of trust relationships and the development of trust management systems in a consistent manner. A formal model of trust relationship is proposed with a strict mathematical structure that can not only reflect many of the commonly used notions of trust, but also provide a solid basis for a unified taxonomy framework of trust where a range of useful properties of trust relationships can be expressed and compared. A classification of trust relationships is presented. A set of definitions, propositions, and operations are proposed for the properties about scope and diversity of trust relationships, direction and symmetry of trust relationships, and relations of trust relationships. A general methodology for analysis and modelling of trust relationships in distributed information system is presented. The general methodology includes a range of major concerns in the whole lifecycle of trust relationships, and provides practical guidelines for analysis and modelling of trust relationships in the real world. A unified framework for trust management is proposed. Trust request, trust evaluation, and trust consuming are handled in a comprehensive and consistent manner. A variety of trust mechanisms including reputation, credentials, local data, and environment parameters are covered under the same framework. A trust management architecture is devised for facilitating the development of trust management systems. A trust management system for federated medical services is developed as an implementation example of the proposed trust management architecture. An online booking system is developed to show how a trust management system is employed by applications. A trust management architecture for web services is devised. It can be viewed as an extension of WS-Trust with the ability to integrate the message building blocks supported by web services protocol stack and other trust mechanisms. It provides high level architecture and guidelines for the development and deployment of a trust management layer in web services. Trust management extension of CardSpace identity system is introduced. Major concerns are listed for the analysis and modelling of trust relationships, and development of trust management systems for digital identities. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

With the growth in social, political and economic importanceof the Internet, it has been recognized that the underlyingtechnology of the next generation Internet must not only meetthe many technical challenges but must also meet the socialexpectations of such a pervasive technology. As evidence ofthe strategic importance of the development of the Internet,the European Union has adopted a communication to the Counciland the European Parliament focusing on the next generationInternet and the priorities for action in migrating to the newInternet protocol IPv6 andalso a new Directive (2002/58/EC) on'processing of personal data and protection of privacy in theelectronic communication sector'. The Data Protection Directiveis part of a package of proposals for initiatives which willform the future regulatory framework for electroniccommunications networks and services. The new Directive aims toadapt and update the existing Data ProtectionTelecommunications Directive (97/66/EC) to take account oftechnological developments. However, it is not well undersoodhow this policy and the underlying Internet technology can bebrought into alignment. This dissertation builds upon the results of my earlierlicentiate thesis by identifying three specific, timely, andimportant privacy areas in the next generation Internet: uniqueidentifiers and observability, privacy enhanced location basedservices, and legal aspects of data traffic. Each of the three areas identified are explored in the eightpublished papers that form this dissertation. The paperspresent recommendations to technical standarization bodies andregulators concerning the next generation Internet so that thistechnology and its deployment can meet the specific legalobligations of the new European Union data protectiondirective.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. During the last decades, in the information age, information privacy has become one of the most essential aspects of privacy. Information privacy is concerned with protecting personal information pertaining to individuals. Organizations, which frequently process the personal information, and individuals, who are the subjects of the information, have different needs, rights and obligations. Organizations need to utilize personal information as a basis to develop tailored services and products to their customers in order to gain advantage over their competitors. Individuals need assurance from the organizations that their personal information is not changed, disclosed, deleted or misused in any other way. Without this guarantee from the organizations, individuals will be more unwilling to share their personal information. Information privacy metrics is a set of parameters used for the quantitative assessment and benchmark of an organization’s measures to protect personal information. These metrics can be used by organizations to demonstrate, and by individuals to evaluate, the type and level of protection given to personal information. Currently, there are no systematically developed, established or widely used information privacy metrics. Hence, the purpose of this study is to establish a solid foundation for building information privacy metrics by discovering some of the most critical constructs and dimensions of these metrics.  The research was conducted within the general research strategy of design science and by applying research methods such as data collection and analysis informed by grounded theory as well as surveys using interviews and questionnaires in Sweden and in Sri Lanka. The result is a conceptual model for information privacy metrics including its basic foundation; the constructs and dimensions of the metrics. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 6: Accepted.</p>

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Computer and Information Science

<p>With the growth in social, political and economic importanceof the Internet, it has been recognized that the underlyingtechnology of the next generation Internet must not only meetthe many technical challenges but must also meet the socialexpectations of such a pervasive technology. As evidence ofthe strategic importance of the development of the Internet,the European Union has adopted a communication to the Counciland the European Parliament focusing on the next generationInternet and the priorities for action in migrating to the newInternet protocol IPv6 andalso a new Directive (2002/58/EC) on'processing of personal data and protection of privacy in theelectronic communication sector'. The Data Protection Directiveis part of a package of proposals for initiatives which willform the future regulatory framework for electroniccommunications networks and services. The new Directive aims toadapt and update the existing Data ProtectionTelecommunications Directive (97/66/EC) to take account oftechnological developments. However, it is not well undersoodhow this policy and the underlying Internet technology can bebrought into alignment.</p><p>This dissertation builds upon the results of my earlierlicentiate thesis by identifying three specific, timely, andimportant privacy areas in the next generation Internet: uniqueidentifiers and observability, privacy enhanced location basedservices, and legal aspects of data traffic.</p><p>Each of the three areas identified are explored in the eightpublished papers that form this dissertation. The paperspresent recommendations to technical standarization bodies andregulators concerning the next generation Internet so that thistechnology and its deployment can meet the specific legalobligations of the new European Union data protectiondirective.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Electrical Engineering Department, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-52).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Computer Science." Includes bibliographical references (p. 121o-128).

The Internet has enabled the collection, aggregation and analysis of personal data on a massive scale. It has also enabled the sharing of collected data in various ways: wholesale outsourcing of data warehousing, partnering with advertisers for targeted advertising, data publishing for exploratory research, etc. This has led to complex privacy questions related to the leakage of sensitive user data and mass harvesting of information by unscrupulous parties. These questions have information-theoretic, sociological and legal aspects and are often poorly understood. There are two fundamental paradigms for how the data is released: in the interactive setting, the data collector holds the data while third parties interact with the data collector to compute some function on the database. In the non-interactive setting, the database is somehow \sanitized" and then published. In this thesis, we conduct a thorough theoretical and empirical investigation of privacy issues involved in non-interactive data release. Both settings have been well analyzed in the academic literature, but simplicity of the non-interactive paradigm has resulted in its being used almost exclusively in actual data releases. We analyze several common applications including electronic directories, collaborative ltering and recommender systems, and social networks. Our investigation has two main foci. First, we present frameworks for privacy and anonymity in these dierent settings within which one might dene exactly when a privacy breach has occurred. Second, we use these frameworks to experimentally analyze actual large datasets and quantify privacy issues. The picture that has emerged from this research is a bleak one for noninteractivity. While a surprising level of privacy control is possible in a limited number of applications, the general sense is that protecting privacy in the non-interactive setting is not as easy as intuitively assumed in the absence of rigorous privacy denitions. While some applications can be salvaged either by moving to an interactive setting or by other means, in others a rethinking of the tradeos between utility and privacy that are currently taken for granted appears to be necessary. / text