PLUTO - A Privacy Control Protocol for e-Commerce Communities

Although e-commerce systems have progressed over the past few years, they lack important aspects such as building long-term and profitable relationships with customers and facilitating an environment that encourages buyers to buy more. The actual execution of e-commerce today is too different from its real-life counterpart, and for the most part it\´s a "Web page" with listing of items and prices. Providing an e-commerce system that brings on-line shopping closer to the actual experience that people have in a real life environment would bring the system closer to the concept of \´e-communities\´. In privacy-preserved communities, the system adheres to basic user protection and privacy principles along existing legal norms. This paper presents a Kerberos-based protocol for controlling and accessing privacy-preserved information from networked applications. Our approach is novel in that it incorporates a number of legal privacy requirements into the technical design of the system itself. To our knowledge this work is the only e-commerce e-community based solution built specifically to meet the requirements of privacy legislation, and designed to be controlled by a third commonly trusted application.