Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

logfiles were analyzed to extract a click-stream 8 of users to evaluate the most interesting
websites for these users.
2.4.3.3. Threats to privacy
Threats to privacy arise when this collected data is used to create user profiles and
(for example) search engine results, advertisements or products are displayed because of
individualized profiles without the knowledge of users [Miy08, Xu07, Moo05] or digital
dossiers are created by collecting and connecting user data available [Gro05]. Another
example would be amazon.com’s tests how certain “variables affect customers’ purchasing
decisions” by offering the same product for a different price - depending on the
customer and the browser used [Ros00]. The above introduced experiment is another
example how powerful such methodologies are and what threats to privacy arise when
data about users is collected and connected.
All this introduced technologies demonstrate that the trade-off between privacy and
services on the Internet (such as personalization) is a much discussed issue [Awa06].
However, it is also shown that users are more willing to provide personal data for personalized
services than for personalized advertisement [Awa06]. Unfortunately both
applications use the same technologies and methodologies to provide such personalized
services. Therefore it sometimes can be hard to distinguish if a cookie is “good” or
“bad” or if profiling for personalized services does make sense or not, especially for a
computer. That is why new technologies and standards are necessary to provide an
answer for the following question: which data is collected by a certain website and what
is it used for? That is exactly the issue where privacy standards such as P3P come into
play and that is why the following section is going to provide an overview about common
privacy standards.
8 A click-stream is a sequence of websites users have been visiting. It is collected to analyze the way
they surf on the website, the duration of their visit, which websites are more popular than others
and to analyze where visitors came from
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