Towards Standardized Web Services Privacy Technologies

A Web service is defined as an autonomous unit of application logic that provides either some business functionality or information to other applications through an Internet connection. Web services are based on a set of XML standards such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Recently there are increasing demands and discussions about Web services privacy technologies in the industry and research community. In general, privacy policies describe an organization's data practices what information they collect from individuals (e.g., consumers) and what (e.g., purposes) they do with it. To enable privacy protection for Web service consumers across multiple domains and services, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a document called "Web Services Architecture (WSA) Requirements" that defines some specific privacy requirements for Web services as a future research topic. At this moment, there is still no standardized Web services privacy technology. This paper briefly overviews the research issues of Web services privacy technologies