Why Do Privacy-Enhancement Mechanisms Fail, After All? A Survey of Both the User and the Provider Perspective

Web2.0 applications have become an inherent part of everyday life, with unpredictable consequences for the privacy of individuals. People communicate via social network sites and participate in the life of others by commenting blogs or tagging web sites, images or videos. Specialized search engines can assemble this information to comprehensive personality profiles, and platform providers have in-depth knowledge of their customers. This is problematic, as data protection is an important factor for the users to establish trust in the platform provider. Without it, Web2.0 services will hardly attract an active community. Our objective is to identify fundamental problems for both classical and Web2.0 providers when handling personal information of the users. Therefore, we explore the challenges that impact the efficiency of current legal and technical mechanisms for data protection. Today’s Internet provides many reasons for such challenges, e.g., legislation issues, economic interests or the particular behavior of Internet users. Data protection depends on the data collectors as well as on the individuals who reveal personal information. Thus, we will analyze online interactions both from the perspective of the user and the provider. We motivate and validate various hypotheses which reflect that users are unaware of the impact of uncontrolled information disclosure. From the other perspective, platform providers often implement informatio