Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

Users surfing the Internet or using Internet-applications leave data behind - either
knowingly or not. This data is for example used to personalize the startpage of the users’
favourite search-engine, ship goods and bill the user, or simply to display personalized
advertisements. Although data protection laws are in place, this data can be used to
find out about users’ preferences or to create user-profiles. From a privacy point of view,
a problem arises considering the lack of data protection on the one hand and the users’
lack of understanding how their data can be misused on the other. This gap can be
filled by providing privacy-policies on websites to inform users how their data is used
before they actually provide the data. However, these privacy-policies are rarely read.
That is why standards which create machine-readable privacy-policies are a possible
solution for this issue: they enable software to automatically inform users if a website’s
privacy policy does not match the users’ privacy preferences. However, as of yet, no such
standard is available which is both widely accepted by website operators and supported
by Internet browsers.