Blind Electronic Commerce

Privacy in Electronic Commerce transactions is the subject of ever increasing research. However, many challenges remain to be overcome. For example, let us consider a customer, Sir Bob, who buys anonymously a product over the Internet. Since he must receive delivery, how could his anonymity be maintained? When dealing with digital products, several solutions have been proposed. But if Sir Bob has bought a physical product, then it might seem that he must give an address for delivery. This would obviously threaten his privacy. Until now, while dealing with privacy in e-commerce, the privacy of physical product delivery has not been considered seriously. Instead, the conventional wisdom (which sometimes even appears in print) is that nothing can be done. In this paper, we introduce Anonymous Delivery Centres (ADCs) to complete the anonymity of the buying process on the Internet that we had initiated in our earlier work on Blind Electronic Commerce. These centres enable Sir Bob to pick u...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JCS
• Authors: Esma Aïmeur, Gilles Brassard, Flavien Serge Mani Onana
• Keywords: Electronic Commerce, JCS 2006, Privacy, Sir Bob