Blind sales in electronic commerce

We start with the usual paradigm in electronic commerce: a consumer who wants to buy from a merchant. However, both parties wish to enjoy maximal privacy. In addition to remaining anonymous, the consumer wants to hide her browsing pattern and even the identification of the product she may decide to buy. Nevertheless, she wants to be able to negotiate the price, pay, receive the product and even enjoy maintenance on it. On the other hand, the merchant wants to leak as little information as possible on his catalogue for fear that he might in fact be dealing with a hostile competitor. For this purpose, we introduce the Blind Customer Buying Behaviour model, which adds confidentiality to the standard Customer Buying Behaviour model. In this paper, we concentrate on blind catalogue browsing. Keywords Electronic Commerce, Customer Buying Behaviour, Cryptography, Oblivious Transfer, Private Information Retrieval, Captcha, Anonymous Surfing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACMICEC
• Authors: Esma Aïmeur, Gilles Brassard, Flavien Serge Mani Onana
• Keywords: ACMICEC 2004, Behaviour Model, Customer Buying Behaviour, Electronic Commerce