Respecting Users' Individual Privacy Constraints in Web Personalization

Web personalization has demonstrated to be advantageous for both online customers and vendors. However, its benefits may be severely counteracted by privacy constraints. Personalized systems need to take users’ privacy concerns into account, as well as privacy laws and industry self-regulation that may be in effect. In this paper, we first discuss how these constraints may affect web-based personalized systems. We then explain in what way current approaches to this problem fall short of their aims, specifically regarding the need to tailor privacy to the constraints of each individual user. We present a dynamic privacy-enhancing user modeling framework as a superior alternative, which is based on a software product line architecture. Our system dynamically selects personalization methods during runtime that respect users’ current privacy concerns as well as the privacy laws and regulations that apply to them.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: UM
• Authors: Yang Wang 0005, Alfred Kobsa
• Keywords: Privacy, Privacy Concerns, Privacy Laws, UM 2007