Privacy on the Web
a Technical Track @ SAC 2010
March 22 - 26, 2010, Sierre, Switzerland

Aims and Scope

Ubiquity of the internet and its global use by billions of people put the privacy aspects of the web into a sharp focus. Even though many well known initiatives concerning privacy, e.g. P3P, EPAL, APPEL, etc. are now more than ten years old, privacy still attracts substantial research around the world.

Concerns with privacy issues in our everyday life and in the usage of the web grow constantly. One inevitably asks what ensures that the web respects our privacy? Here are some of the basic privacy questions we may face daily on the web:

• when we read information on a web site, how can we ensure that our privacy is preserved?
• when we chat on the web, how can we ensure that people we are talking to will preserve our privacy?
• when we search for information with a search engine, how can we ensure that traces of our searches will not be used for purposes outside our control?
• when we register on a website, how can we ensure that private data will not be disseminated on the web to other parties we do not trust?
• when a service is required by a software component or user, how one ensure the web service or the software agent will only use the data as promised and will respect the privacy of our data?
• when we register with a social network, how do we trust that the network and its participants will respect the privacy of the data we make available?

The goal of this technical track is to investigate methods, techniques and tools that might help to provide some answers to questions such as those stated above, in the field of privacy on the web. The web is understood quite generally, i.e. we invite research in the fields of distributed systems, multi-agent systems, web services, web servers, etc.

Topics

A non exhaustive list of issues addressed by this technical track in the context of privacy on the Web is: