Privacy Enhancing Technologies

This textbook provides a unique lens through which the myriad of existing Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) can be easily comprehended and appreciated. It answers key privacy-centered questions with clear and detailed explanations. Why is privacy important? How and why is your privacy being eroded and what risks can this pose for you? What are some tools for protecting your privacy in online environments? How can these tools be understood, compared, and evaluated? What steps can you take to gain more control over your personal data? This book addresses the above questions by focusing on three fundamental elements: It introduces a simple classification of PETs that allows their similarities and differences to be highlighted and analyzed; It describes several specific PETs in each class, including both foundational technologies and important recent additions to the field; It explains how to use this classification to determine which privacy goals are actually achievable in a given real-world environment. Once the goals are known, this allows the most appropriate PETs to be selected in order to add the desired privacy protection to the target environment. To illustrate, the book examines the use of PETs in conjunction with various security technologies, with the legal infrastructure, and with communication and computing technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Machine Learning (ML). Designed as an introductory textbook on PETs, this book is essential reading for graduate-level students in computer science and related fields, prospective PETs researchers, privacy advocates, and anyone interested in technologies to protect privacy in online environments.

Anonymity and unobservability have become key issues in the context of securing privacy on the Internet and in other communication networks. Services that provide anonymous and unobservable access to the Internet are important for electronic commerce applications as well as for services where users want to remain anonymous. This book is devoted to the design and realization of anonymity services for the Internet and other communcation networks. The book offers topical sections on: attacks on systems, anonymous publishing, mix systems, identity management, pseudonyms and remailers. Besides nine technical papers, an introduction clarifying the terminology for this emerging area is presented as well as a survey article introducing the topic to a broader audience interested in security issues.

This open access book provides researchers and professionals with a foundational understanding of online privacy as well as insight into the socio-technical privacy issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems, covering several modern topics (e.g., privacy in social media, IoT) and underexplored areas (e.g., privacy accessibility, privacy for vulnerable populations, cross-cultural privacy). The book is structured in four parts, which follow after an introduction to privacy on both a technical and social level: Privacy Theory and Methods covers a range of theoretical lenses through which one can view the concept of privacy. The chapters in this part relate to modern privacy phenomena, thus emphasizing its relevance to our digital, networked lives. Next, Domains covers a number of areas in which privacy concerns and implications are particularly salient, including among others social media, healthcare, smart cities, wearable IT, and trackers. The Audiences section then highlights audiences that have traditionally been ignored when creating privacy-preserving experiences: people from other (non-Western) cultures, people with accessibility needs, adolescents, and people who are underrepresented in terms of their race, class, gender or sexual identity, religion or some combination. Finally, the chapters in Moving Forward outline approaches to privacy that move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions, explore ethical considerations, and describe the regulatory landscape that governs privacy through laws and policies. Perhaps even more so than the other chapters in this book, these chapters are forward-looking by using current personalized, ethical and legal approaches as a starting point for re-conceptualizations of privacy to serve the modern technological landscape. The book's primary goal is to inform IT students, researchers, and professionals about both the fundamentals of online privacy and the issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems. Lecturers or teachers can assign (parts of) the book for a “professional issues” course. IT professionals may select chapters covering domains and audiences relevant to their field of work, as well as the Moving Forward chapters that cover ethical and legal aspects. Academics who are interested in studying privacy or privacy-related topics will find a broad introduction in both technical and social aspects.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PET 2006, held in Cambridge, UK, in June 2006 co-located with WEIS 2006, the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, and WOTE 2006, the IAVoSS Workshop On Trustworthy Elections. The 24 revised full papers present novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PET 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2004. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 68 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Among the topics addressed are mix networks, mix firewalls, traffic analysis, sequence analysis, re-encryption, electromagnetic eavesdropping, anonymity of banknotes, IPv6, trustworthy environments, flow correlation attacks, anonymity measuring, mix cascades, trust negotiation, privacy policies, and personalization.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PET 2002, held in San Francisco, CA, USA, in April 2002. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Among the topics addressed are Internet security, private authentication, information theoretic anonymity, anonymity measuring, enterprise privacy practices, service architectures for privacy, intersection attacks, online trust negotiation, random data perturbation, Website fingerprinting, Web user privacy, TCP timestamps, private information retrieval, and unobservable Web surfing.

Over the last several years, the realm of technology and privacy has been transformed, creating a landscape that is both dangerous and encouraging. Significant changes include large increases in communications bandwidths; the widespread adoption of computer networking and public-key cryptography; new digital media that support a wide range of social relationships; a massive body of practical experience in the development and application of data-protection laws; and the rapid globalization of manufacturing, culture, and policy making. The essays in this book provide a new conceptual framework for the analysis and debate of privacy policy and for the design and development of information systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Symposium, PETS 2011, held in Waterloo, Canada, in July 2011. The 15 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers address design and realization of privacy services for the Internet, other data systems and communication networks. Presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems the volume also features novel technical contributions from other communities such as law, business, and data protection authorities, that present their perspectives on technological issues.