Preserving Privacy in Web Services

Web services are increasingly being adopted as a viable means to access Web-based applications. This has been enabled by the tremendous standardization effort to describe, advertise, discover, and invoke Web services. Digital government (DG) is a major application domain for Web services. It aims at improving government-citizen interactions using information and communication technologies. Government agencies collect, store, process, and share information about millions of citizens who have different preferences regarding their privacy. This naturally raises a number of legal and technical issues that must be addressed to preserve citizens' privacy through the control of the information flow amongst different entities (users, Web services, DBMSs). Solutions addressing this issue are still in their infancy. They consist, essentially, of enforcing privacy by law or by self-regulation. In this paper, we propose a new technical approach for preserving privacy in government Web services. Our design is based on digital privacy credentials, data filters and mobile privacy preserving agents. This work aims at establishing the feasibility and provable reliability of technology-based privacy preserving solutions for Web service infrastructures.