Privacy-preserving Transactions on the Web

There is a rapid growth in the number of applications using sensitive and personal information on the World Wide Web. This growth creates an urgent need to maintain the anonymity of the participants in many web transactions and to preserve the privacy of their sensitive data during data dissemination over the web. First, maintaining the anonymity of users on the World Wide Web is essential for a number of web applications. Anonymity cannot be assured by single interested individuals or an organization but requires participation from other web nodes owned by other entities. Second, preserving the privacy of sensitive data is another very important issue in web transactions. Today, exchanging and sharing personal data between various participants in web transactions endangers privacy. In this article, we discuss various research directions and challenges that need to be addressed while trying to accomplish our goal of maintaining the anonymity of participants and preserving the privacy of sensitive data in web transactions. To maintain anonymity of participants in a web transaction, we propose a method based on the modi fied form of the club mechanism with economic incentives, a solution which rests upon the Prisoner’s Dilemma approach. We compare our approach to other well-known dat a-sharing approaches such as Crowds, Tor, Tarzan and LPWA. To maintain the privacy of sensitive data, we propose a solution based on privacy-preserving data dissemination (P2D2). We also present a solution to implement our approach using Semantic Web Rule Languages and Jena—a Java-based inference engine