Privacy Issues in Web Services: An Ontology Based Solution

Privacy is the right of a person to specify that when, how and to what amount information about him is disclosed to others. Due to the tremendous use and popularity of web services, the likelihood of intentional and unintentional privacy disclosures is also increasing. The web services users generate a rich amount of information when they browse the websites of the service providers, access social networking sites to post their comments & product reviews, and store their data in the cloud. The data such generated is a voluminous and valuable treasure for the marketers as well as advertisers. The emerging technologies and fast increasing online activities of users are posing new threats to user's privacy and digital life. While accessing the web services, users unknowingly agree to the privacy policy of the service provider through which they authorize the service providers to collect and share their personally identifiable information. Most of the users think that while accepting the privacy policy of the service provider, they are protecting their privacy but actually they are signing the policy which informs them about the privacy rights they are surrendering to the service providers. In this paper, we aim to minimise the privacy related information disclosure of the user through various prevalent semantic web based technologies.