A reputation-based approach to preserving privacy in Web services

The Web is an environment where users, Web services, and software agents exchange sensitive personal information. This calls for enforceable strategies to preserve people's privacy. In most solutions, users define their respective privacy requirements and must themselves make the decision about information disclosure. Personal judgments are usually made based on the sensitivity of the information and the reputation of the party to which the information is to be disclosed. The emerging semantic Web is expected to make the challenge more acute in the sense that it would provide a whole infrastructure for the automation of semantics in the Web. On the privacy front, this means that privacy invasion would net more quality and sensitive personal information. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based approach to automate privacy enforcement in a semantic Web environment. We propose a reputation management system that monitors Web services and collects, evaluates, updates, and disseminates information related to their reputation for the purpose of privacy protection.