Enhancing User Privacy in Adaptive Web Sites with Client-Side User Profiles

Abstract

Web personalization is an elegant and flexible process of making a web site responsive to the unique needs of each individual user. Data that reflects user preferences and likings, comprising therefore a user profile, are gathered to an adaptive web site in a non transparent manner. This situation however raises serious privacy concerns to the end user. When browsing aweb site, users are not aware of several important privacy parameters i.e., which behavior will be monitored and logged, how it will be processed, how long it will be kept, and with whom it will be shared in the long run. In this paper we propose an abstract architecture that enhances user privacy during interaction with adaptive web sites. This architecture enables users to create and update their personal privacy preferences for the adaptive web sites they visit by holding their (user) profiles in the client side instead of the server side. By doing so users will be able to self-confine the personalization experience the adaptive sites offer, thus enhancing privacy.