Towards trusted online dissemination of consumer information

Given the growing number of electronic services and their applications in many existing and evolving domains, such as e-tail and e-medicine, much recent attention has been focused on the collection, maintenance, and dissemination of personal information by electronic service providers (ESPs). Often, information is gathered without the active involvement of the consumers, who may be unaware of the nature of the data collected or the purposes for which these data will be used. Techniques such as cookies generally are implemented on the browsers without permission from the targeted consumer. In this paper, we propose a new framework for information dissemination to ESPs using secure communication of consumer-controlled information via trusted information distribution (TID) services. A TID service gathers information based on consumer consent and consumer-controlled profile then disseminates relevant information to targeted groups of ESPs. Using encryption and a group key management scheme, our communications mechanism securely and discriminately disseminates information to dynamic groups of ESPs that subscribe to the TID service.