Trading Privacy in the Cloud: A Fairer Way to Share Private Information

Millions of people use cloud services for remote storage, events management etc. By using these services, users share and synchronise their information amongst multiple devices seamlessly. Nevertheless, the freemium model that most of them follow, endangers and in many cases invades the privacy of the users. With the aim to avoid privacy issues, which limit social progress, in this article we propose a new privacy-aware protocol and architecture allowing a new and fairer business model based on the concept of Privacy as a Product (PaaP). Our proposal is based on well-known cryptography such as re-encryption, Bloom filters and the Raykova-Vo-Bellowin-Malkin scheme. With our proposal, users gain full control over their privacy and they can allow advertising companies to mine their information. Cloud service providers act as brokers and get revenues from each transaction. Thus, ours is a win-win model overcoming the limitations derived from the privacy invasion of current models.