With the increasing volume of web services in the cloud environment, Collaborative Filtering- based service recommendation has become one of the most effective techniques to alleviate the heavy burden on the service selection decisions of a target user. However, the service recommendation bases, that is, historical service usage data, are often distributed in different cloud platforms. Two challenges are present in such a cross-cloud service recommendation scenario. First, a cloud platform is often not willing to share its data to (...) other cloud platforms due to privacy concerns, which decreases the feasibility of cross-cloud service recommendation severely. Second, the historical service usage data recorded in each cloud platform may update over time, which reduces the recommendation scalability significantly. In view of these two challenges, a novel privacy-preserving and scalable service recommendation approach based on SimHash, named SerRecSimHash, is proposed in this paper. Finally, through a set of experiments deployed on a real distributed service quality dataset WS-DREAM, we validate the feasibility of our proposal in terms of recommendation accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing privacy-preservation. (shrink)

Pervasive, easy-to-use privacy services are keys to enabling users to maintain control of their private data in the online environment. This paper proposes (1) an online privacy lifecycle from the user perspective that drives and categorizes the development of these services, (2) a layered platform design solution for online privacy, (3) the evolution of the PeCAN (Personal Context Agent Networking) architecture to a platform for pervasively providing multiple contexts for user privacy preferences and online (...) informational privacy services, and (4) use of platform network effects for increasing wide-scale user adoption of privacy services. One implication of this paper’s concepts is that platform-mediated networks, which are reportedly the vehicles for most of the revenue earned by 60 of the world’s largest companies, and other platforms that commonly host millions of users, will not have to individually reinvent and manage sophisticated user services for privacy protection since universal privacy platforms can be layered on them in future. (shrink)

Web mining refers to the whole of data miningand related techniques that are used toautomatically discover and extract informationfrom web documents and services. When used in abusiness context and applied to some type ofpersonal data, it helps companies to builddetailed customer profiles, and gain marketingintelligence. Web mining does, however, pose athreat to some important ethical values likeprivacy and individuality. Web mining makes itdifficult for an individual to autonomouslycontrol the unveiling and dissemination of dataabout his/her private life. To study thesethreats, (...) we distinguish between `content andstructure mining' and `usage mining.' Webcontent and structure mining is a cause forconcern when data published on the web in acertain context is mined and combined withother data for use in a totally differentcontext. Web usage mining raises privacyconcerns when web users are traced, and theiractions are analysed without their knowledge.Furthermore, both types of web mining are oftenused to create customer files with a strongtendency of judging and treating people on thebasis of group characteristics instead of ontheir own individual characteristics and merits(referred to as de-individualisation). Althoughthere are a variety of solutions toprivacy-problems, none of these solutionsoffers sufficient protection. Only a combinedsolution package consisting of solutions at anindividual as well as a collective level cancontribute to release some of the tensionbetween the advantages and the disadvantages ofweb mining. The values of privacy andindividuality should be respected and protectedto make sure that people are judged and treatedfairly. People should be aware of theseriousness of the dangers and continuouslydiscuss these ethical issues. This should be ajoint responsibility shared by web miners (bothadopters and developers), web users, andgovernments. (shrink)

As libraries begin to embrace Web 2.0 technologies to serve patrons—ushering in the era of Library 2.0—unique dilemmas arise in the realm of information ethics, especially regarding patron privacy. The norms of Web 2.0 promote the open sharing of information—often personal information—and the design of many Library 2.0 services capitalize on access to patron information and might require additional tracking, collection, and aggregation of patron activities. Thus, embracing Library 2.0 potentially threatens the traditional ethics of librarianship, where protecting (...) patron privacy and intellectual freedom has been held paramount. The question is not whether libraries will move toward Library 2.0, but how they will do it, and whether they can preserve the contextual integrity of patron privacy and maintain their professional librarian ethic, while also providing enhanced services to their patrons. This article will provide an ethical examination of the emergence of new Library 2.0 tools and technologies in relation to existing ethical norms of information flow within the library context. By doing so, librarians and information professionals will be better situated to avoid—or at least renegotiate—the impending Faustian bargain regarding patron privacy in the "2.0" era. (shrink)

The Web 2.0, with online social technologies such as social networking services, blogs, wikis, or microbloging, has brought the vision of the Internet as a social landscape in which people are engaged in a multitude of social activities. This editorial of the special issue ‘Social Web and Identity’ discusses the importance of identity in the context of the Social Web, introducing the different papers of this special issue and the different aspects associated to these online identities. The topics covered (...) in this issue include how people define their identity in blogs and what is the articulation between online and offline identities in these systems. It also presents an article studying the privacy issues in online social networks and more specifically how these risks are perceived and how people can control their identity in this context. The next article compares privacy in two different categories of social systems (social network and collaborative workspace). Finally, another article discusses to what extent the current legislation, such the data protection regulations directive 95/46/EC, is providing the right instrument for dealing with privacy issues. (shrink)

The paper examines today’s debate on the new responsibilities of Internet service providers in connection with legal problems concerning jurisdiction, data processing, people’s privacy and education. The focus is foremost on the default rules and safe harbour clauses for ISPs liability, set up by the US and European legal systems. This framework is deepened in light of the different functions of the services provided on the Internet so as to highlight multiple levels of control over information and, correspondingly, (...) different types of liability. The new responsibilities of ISPs concern the original “end-to-end” architecture of the medium and policies on design rather than responsibility for user content and individual messages. (shrink)

Web 2.0 innovations may enhance informed patient decision-making, but also raise ethical concerns about inaccurate or misleading information, damage to the doctor-patient relationship, privacy and confidentiality, and health disparities. To increase the benefits and decrease the risks of these innovations, we recommend steps to help patients assess the quality of health information on the Internet; promote constructive doctor-patient communication about new information technologies; and set standards for privacy and data security in patient-controlled health records and for point-of-service advertising.

Online service providers —such as AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter—significantly shape the informational environment and influence users’ experiences and interactions within it. There is a general agreement on the centrality of OSPs in information societies, but little consensus about what principles should shape their moral responsibilities and practices. In this article, we analyse the main contributions to the debate on the moral responsibilities of OSPs. By endorsing the method of the levels of abstract, we first analyse the moral responsibilities (...) of OSPs in the web. These concern the management of online information, which includes information filtering, Internet censorship, the circulation of harmful content, and the implementation and fostering of human rights. We then consider the moral responsibilities ascribed to OSPs on the web and focus on the existing legal regulation of access to users’ data. The overall analysis provides an overview of the current state of the debate and highlights two main results. First, topics related to OSPs’ public role—especially their gatekeeping function, their corporate social responsibilities, and their role in implementing and fostering human rights—have acquired increasing relevance in the specialised literature. Second, there is a lack of an ethical framework that can define OSPs’ responsibilities, and provide the fundamental sharable principles necessary to guide OSPs’ conduct within the multicultural and international context in which they operate. This article contributes to the ethical framework necessary to deal with and by endorsing a LoA enabling the definition of the responsibilities of OSPs with respect to the well-being of the infosphere and of the entities inhabiting it. (shrink)

Purpose In considering the ubiquity of information systems and the increasingly important role served in modern business and service delivery, social media if properly leveraged gives potential competitive advantage to a company in its respective industry. With Paramount Web Nigeria Ltd. as a case study, this paper aims to focus on the important aspects of adopting social media as an IS such as data privacy principles and the role of social media in the context of a small internet service (...) company. Design/methodology/approach Relevant research information was relied upon to highlight the various factors involved with adopting social media as an IS. Findings Data handling and privacy policies must also be considered and properly devised if the concerned company is to effectively adopt social media as an IS. Decision-making tools such as SWOT analysis and the quality triangle are vital during the planning stages of deploying an IS. Research limitations/implications Research papers on aspects of social media as an IS especially in West African academia has been lacking. The challenge is in contextual information related to similar topics. Practical implications Findings detailed in this paper will serve to provide a better understanding of the important factors to be considered when adapting a new IS to an existing business. Originality/value This paper serves to highlight the potential factors to be considered when dealing with business ISs with a strong focus on social media and internet related services. (shrink)

in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2007.

The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism [DDB] (http://buddhism-dict.net/ddb), now on the Web for more than 15 years, has become a primary reference work for the field of Buddhist Studies. Containing over 53,000 entries, it is subscribed to by more than 30 university libraries (http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/subscribing_libraries.html), and supported by the contributions of over 70 specialists, many of these recognized leaders in the field. It can perhaps be described as example of the type of web resource that has reached a degree of status and (...) sustainability such that it has been able to grow and thrive as a collaborativelydeveloped online reference—despite having little funding or the support of a major organization or team of programmers—in the age where such resources are so readily washed away by the combination of Wikipedia and Google. Thus, the field of Buddhist Studies has its own reliable, scholarly-edited, fully documented and responsible resource that has developed a center of gravity sufficient for it to continue to grow as the resource that specialists turn to first without hesitation, and to which they may contribute knowing that they will be clearly accredited, and that what they write will not be deleted or changed in the following moment by, for example, a junior high school student. Recently, the technical advisor to the DDB, Michael Beddow, has completed a full overhaul of the supporting structure of the DDB and CJKV-E dictionaries, which will include a broad range of enhanced functions, both internal to the dictionary and in terms of interoperation with other lexicons and web corpora. This presentation will start off with a demonstration of the most advanced functions of the DDB, to be followed by a brief overview of its technical framework (P5-influenced XML, delivered through XSL and Perl). We will then outline the key factors of the management of the DDB that we believe have most directly contributed to its success. (shrink)

As privacy concerns among consumers rise, service providers increasingly want to provide services that support privacy enhancing technologies. At the same time, online service providers must be able to protect themselves against misbehaving users. For instance, users that do not pay their bill must be held accountable for their behavior. This tension between privacy and accountability is fundamental, however a tradeoff is not always required. In this article we propose the concept of a time capsule, that (...) is, a verifiable encryption with timed and revocable decryptability. The time capsule together with its related protocols offer support of privacy while retaining strong accountability. In our scheme an honest user may enjoy full anonymity, but dishonest users who do not pay their bill have their identity revealed. In contrast to existing revocable anonymity systems, our proposed scheme requires less trust in an external authority, while simultaneously making accountability easier (and less costly) to achieve. (shrink)

Telecommunications services are for long subject to privacy regulations. At stake are traditionally: privacy of the communication and the protection of traffic data. Privacy of the communication is legally founded. Traffic data subsume under the notion of data protection and are central in the discussion. The telecommunications environment is profoundly changing. The traditionally closed markets with closed networks change into an open market with open networks. Within these open networks more privacy sensitive data are generated (...) and have to be exchanged between growing numbers of parties. Also telecommunications and computer networks are rapidly being integrated and thus the distinction between telephony and computing disappears. Traditional telecommunications privacy regulations are revised to cover internet applications. In this paper telecommunications issues are recalled to aid the on-going debate. Cellular mobile phones have recently be introduced. Cellular networks process a particular category of traffic data namely location data, thereby introducing the issue of territorial privacy into the telecommunications domain. Location data are bound to be used for pervasive future services. Designs for future services are discussed and evaluated for their impact on privacy protection. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the issue of privacy protection in context aware services, through the use of entropy as a means of measuring the capability of locating a user’s whereabouts and identifying personal selections. We present a framework for calculating levels of abstraction in location and personal preferences reporting in queries to a context aware services server. Finally, we propose a methodology for determining the levels of abstraction in location and preferences that should be applied in (...) user data reporting during service provision, according to her personal privacy settings. (shrink)

With the development of mobile communication technology, location-based services are booming prosperously. Meanwhile privacy protection has become the main obstacle for the further development of LBS. The k-nearest neighbor search is one of the most common types of LBS. In this paper, we propose an efficient private circular query protocol with high accuracy rate and low computation and communication cost. We adopt the Moore curve to convert two-dimensional spatial data into one-dimensional sequence and encrypt the points of interest (...) information with the Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan homomorphic encryption scheme for privacy-preserving. The proposed scheme performs the secret circular shift of the encrypted POIs information to hide the location of the user without a trusted third party. To reduce the computation and communication cost, we dynamically divide the table of the POIs information according to the value of k. Experiments show that the proposed scheme provides high accuracy query results while maintaining low computation and communication cost. (shrink)

Approximately 1 in 30 people develop cancer due to an underlying familial predisposition. Genetic counselling and testing for people with (and at risk of) familial cancer are becoming more widely available, but service providers need to address challenging issues in relation to privacy and property. As in any counselling situation, a genetic counsellor seeks to ensure that the principles of autonomy, confidentiality, beneficence, and equity operate in favour of the client. But in dealing with a familial disorder, the application (...) of these principles to the individual must be balanced with the potential for these principles to apply to other family members. This paper summarises the recent experience of a familial cancer service in seeking to avoid situations in which these principles, operating for both individual clients and their relatives, can come into conflict. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of privacy in occupational health services. Data were collected through in-depth theme interviews with occupational health professionals (n=15), employees (n=15) and employers (n=14). Our findings indicate that privacy, in this context, is a complex and multilayered concept, and that companies as well as individual employees have their own core secrets. Co-operation between the three groups proved challenging: occupational health professionals have to consider carefully in which situations (...) and how much they are entitled to release private information on individual employees for the benefit of the whole company. Privacy is thus not an absolute right of an individual, but involves the idea of sharing responsibility. The findings open up useful new perspectives on ethical questions of privacy and on the development of occupational health practices. (shrink)

Privacy is a key ethical principle in occupational health services. Its importance is emphasised in several laws, in ethical codes of conduct as well as in the literature, yet there is only very limited empirical research on privacy in the occupational health context. Conceptual questions on privacy in the occupational health context are discussed. The baseline assumption is that, in this context, privacy cannot be approached and examined only from the employee’s vantage point but the (...) employer’s point of view must also be taken into account, and that the concept has several dimensions . Even though privacy is a basic human need, there is no universally accepted definition of the concept and no consensus on whether an organisation can have privacy in the same way as people do. Many of the challenges surrounding privacy in the context of occupational health seem to be associated with the dual loyalties of occupational health professionals towards the employee and employer and with their simultaneous duties of disseminating and protecting information . Privacy is thus not an absolute value, but more research is needed to understand its multidimensional nature in the context of occupational health. (shrink)

For a person to squeeze his fingers is legal. For a person to face towards another person is legal. For a person to sight down the barrel of a gun is legal. Yet, for that same person to do all three of these things at once is very illegal. Although Google Street View, or GSV for short, and similar services may be comprised of previously accepted functions---operation of an automobile, photography, internet publishing, mapmaking, advertising, etc.---the whole of a thing (...) is far different from the constituent pieces with which it is comprised. The context, accessibility, and ease of manipulation pertaining to the data presented by Google are radically altered by the organization that is fundamental to the product. Google Street View must be evaluated as an experimental and almost completely unprecedented foray into a still developing area of technology. (shrink)

The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. (...) Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory. (shrink)

Mobile health services have been widely used in medical services and health management through mobile devices and multiple channels, such as smartphones, wearable equipment, healthcare applications, and medical platforms. However, the number of the users who are currently receiving the mHealth services is small. In China, more than 70% of internet users have never used mHealth services. Such imbalanced situation could be attributed to users’ traditional concept of medical treatment, psychological factors and privacy concerns. The (...) purpose of this study is to explore the direct and indirect effects of mHealth users’ self-efficacy and privacy concerns on their intention to adopt mHealth services, providing guidelines for mHealth service providers to enhance users’ intention of adoption. A questionnaire was designed by the research team and 386 valid responses were collected from domestic participants in China. Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model, a research model integrated self-efficacy and privacy concerns was constructed to investigate their effects on users’ intention to adopt mobile mHealth services. The results show that self-efficacy could facilitate users’ intention to adopt mHealth services, and had a significantly positive effect on perceived ubiquity, effort expectancy, performance expectancy and subjective norm. This study verifies the direct and indirect effects of self-efficacy and privacy concerns on users’ intention to adopt mHealth services, providing a different perspective for studying mHealth adoption behavior. The findings could provide guidelines for mHealth service providers to improve their service quality and enhance users’ intention of adoption. (shrink)

McCoy et al. introduces the novel Ethical Data Practices Framework and its six core principles to serve as a useful tool to inform both industry and lawmakers of key ethical principles for prospect...

To meet all physicians' needs for ethics consultation in Finland, a novel form of service, the Physicians' Ethics Forum, was founded in 2003. The Forum is a cost-efficient service based on electronic communication. In this paper, experiences throughout its first 6 years are described.

Scalability, efficiency, and security had been a persistent problem over the years in data mining, several techniques had been proposed and implemented but none had been able to solve the problem of scalability, efficiency and security from cloud computing. In this research, we solve the problem scalability, efficiency and security in data mining over cloud computing by using a restful web services and combination of different technologies and tools, our model was trained by using different machine learning algorithm, and (...) finally using different validation and cross-validation methods to compare and validate our results. We build, train, test and deploy our model by restful API services which can be called through an endpoint, and with very high accuracy and huge success. (shrink)

Today’s computer network technologies are sociologically founded on hunter-gatherer principles; common users may be possible subjects of surveillance and sophisticated internet-based attacks are almost impossible to prevent. At the same time, information and communication technology, ICT offers the technical possibility of embedded privacy protection. Making technology legitimate by design is a part of the intentional design for democracy. This means incorporating options for socially acceptable behaviour in technical systems, and making the basic principles of privacy protection, rights and (...) responsibilities, transparent to the user. The current global e-polis already has, by means of different technologies, de facto built-in policies that define the level of user-privacy protection. That which remains is to make their ethical implications explicit and understandable to citizens of the global village through interdisciplinary disclosive ethical methods, and to make them correspond to the high ethical norms that support trust, the essential precondition of any socialization. The good news is that research along these lines is already in progress. Hopefully, this will result in a future standard approach to the privacy of network communications. (shrink)

We consider the privacy of personal information on the World Wide Web, emphasizing a concept of privacy as an aspect of social relationships between individuals. We make three contributions to understanding the right to privacy on the Web: we highlight the role of informed consent as an important consideration for privacy, we identify conditions under which the collection and centralization of personal information can be ethically justified, and we offer an interpretation of a "reasonable expectation of (...) privacy" for Internet cookies, a mechanism used by Web sites to remember information about visits to that site.The views, opinions, and conclusions of this paper are not necessarily those of the University of Illinois. Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, Dallas, TX, February 26[28, 1998, and the ACM Policy 98 Conference, Washington D.C., May 10-12, 1998.Address for correspondence: Michael C. Loui, Graduate College, 801 S. Wright Street, Champaign, IL 61820-6210, e-mail: [email protected], telephone: 333-6715, fax: 333-8019. (shrink)

Respecting privacy and patients’ satisfaction are amongst the main indicators of quality of care and one of the basic goals of health services. This study, carried out in 2007, aimed to investigate the extent to which patient privacy is observed and its correlation with patient satisfaction in three emergency departments of Tehran University of Medical Science, Iran. Questionnaire data were collected from a convenience sample of 360 patients admitted to emergency departments and analysed using SPSS software. The (...) results indicated that, according to 50.6% of the patients, the extent to which their privacy was respected was described as either ‘weak’ or ‘average’. Spearman’s coefficient indicated a significant correlation between respecting privacy and the patients’ satisfaction about the various aspects of privacy studied. Considering the levels of privacy observed together with the patients’ degree of satisfaction, it is imperative that clinical professionals address both aspects from conceptual and practical viewpoints. (shrink)

An article by Melissa Gymrek and colleagues, published this January in Science, described how the researchers used surname inferences from commercial genealogy databases and Internet searches to deduce the identity of nearly fifty research participants whose supposedly private data were stored in large, publicly available datasets. This news comes just months after the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues published a report that expressed serious concerns about personal privacy and security in whole genome sequencing. The bioethics commission (...) (on which we serve as chair and vice‐chair) highlighted the importance of reconciling the enormous public benefits anticipated from research in this area with the potential risks to individuals’ privacy, and it offered several policy proposals to help balance the potential of scientific progress with privacy and respect for persons. The human subjects research protections laid out in the federal regulations are triggered by the identifiability of data. The participants in the Gymrek et al. study were not “readily identifiable”; however, the data proved far more easily identifiable than expected. With rapidly evolving technology, a precise definition of that notion may be impossible. But if we move the debate from the rhetoric of identifiability to the ethical principles of public beneficence and the centrality of respecting all persons, we find that the real ethical focus must be on promoting generalizable progress while at all times respecting individual privacy. (shrink)

This paper proposes a roadmap for how privacy leakages from outsourced managed security services using intrusion detection systems can be controlled. The paper first analyses the risk of leaking private or confidential information from signature-based intrusion detection systems. It then discusses how the situation can be improved by developing adequate privacy enforcement methods and privacy leakage metrics in order to control and reduce the leakage of private and confidential information over time. Such metrics should allow for (...) quantifying how much information that is leaking, where these information leakages are, as well as showing what these leakages mean. This includes adding enforcement mechanisms ensuring that operation on sensitive information is transparent and auditable. The data controller or external quality assurance organisations can then verify or certify that the security operation operates in a privacy friendly manner. The roadmap furthermore outlines how privacy-enhanced intrusion detection systems should be implemented by initially providing privacy-enhanced alarm handling and then gradually extending support for privacy enhancing operation to other areas like digital forensics, exchange of threat information and big data analytics based attack detection. (shrink)

Informational self-determination refers to the right or ability of individuals to exercise personal control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal data by others. The basis of modern privacy laws and practices around the world, informational privacy has become a challenging concept to protect and promote in a world of ubiquitous and unlimited data sharing and storage among organizations. The paper advocates a “user-centric” approach to managing personal data online. However, user-centricity can be problematic when the (...) user—the data subject—is not directly involved in transactions involving the disclosure, collection, processing, and storage of their personal data. Identity data is increasingly being generated, used and stored entirely in the networked “Cloud”, where it is under control of third parties. The paper explores possible technology solutions to ensure that individuals will be able to exercise informational self-determination in an era of network grid computing, exponential data creation, ubiquitous surveillance and rampant online fraud. The paper describes typical “Web 2.0” use scenarios, suggests some technology building blocks to protect and promote informational privacy online, and concludes with a call to develop a privacy-respective information technology ecosystem for identity management. Specifically, the paper outlines four fundamental technological approaches to help assure widespread and enduring online participation, confidence and trust in the information society. (shrink)

This paper examines workplace surveillance and monitoring. It is argued that privacy is a moral right, and while such surveillance and monitoring can be justified in some circumstances, there is a presumption against the infringement of privacy. An account of privacy precedes consideration of various arguments frequently given for the surveillance and monitoring of employees, arguments which look at the benefits, or supposed benefits, to employees as well as to employers. The paper examines the general monitoring of (...) work, and the monitoring of email, listservers and the World Wide Web. It is argued that many of the common justifications given for this surveillance and monitoring do not stand up to close scrutiny. (shrink)

The 2010 competition was the sixth year of the Schubmehl-Prein contest for the Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing. The topic for this year turned was one that turned out to be in the news even more than anticipated -- What Should Individual Privacy Rights Be With Respect To Services Such As "Street View? The topic was originally envisioned primarily as one that would lead students to consider the different concepts of privacy that various countries have (...) enforced in dealing with Street View. But the anticipated scope expanded when Street View hit the news for having intercepted and saved some unsecured wireless traffic during data acquisition. In any case, this year's topic was clearly one that students were able to have fun working on. (shrink)

Technological advances are bringing new light to privacy issues and changing the reasons for why privacy is important. These advances have changed not only the kind of personal data that is available to be collected, but also how that personal data can be used by those who have access to it. We are particularly concerned with how information about personal attributes inferred from collected data (such as online behaviour), can be used to tailor messages and services to (...) specific individuals or groups. This kind of ‘personalised targeting’ has the potential to influence individuals’ perceptions, attitudes, and choices in unprecedented ways. In this paper, we argue that because it is becoming easier for companies to use collected data for influence, threats to privacy are increasingly also threats to personal autonomy—an individual’s ability to reflect on and decide freely about their values, actions, and behaviour, and to act on those choices.4 While increasing attention is directed to the ethics of how personal data is collected, we make the case that a new ethics of privacy needs to also think more rigorously about how personal data may be used, and its potential impact on personal autonomy. (shrink)

In Vayena’s article, ‘direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics on the scales of autonomy’, she claims that there may be a strong autonomy-based argument for permitting DTC genomic services. In this response, I point out how the diminishment of one’s genetic privacy can cause a relevant autonomy-related harm which must be balanced against the autonomy-related gains DTC services provide. By drawing on conceptual connections between privacy and the Razian conception of autonomy, I show that DTC genetic testing may decrease (...) the range of valuable options individuals possess, which impacts the extent to which would-be consumers can exercise their autonomy. (shrink)

Experiment with public deployment of the semantic service matchmaker to a UDDI registry for a year is described in this paper. UDDI is a standard registry for Web Services, but, its search functionality has been limited to a keyword search. Therefore, we propose an enhancement of UDDI, called Matchmaker, that supports semantic service capability discovery. Since September 2003, we have deployed the Matchmaker in one of four official UDDI registries operated by NTT-Communications. In this paper, we first introduce the (...) Matchmaker, and illustrate client tools which lower the threshold of use of semantics. Then, we evaluate this experiment by benchmarks in terms of its performance and functionality. Finally, we discuss user requirements obtained by two ways: questionnaire and observation of search behavior. (shrink)

The notion of validity fulfils a crucial role in legal theory. In the emerging Web 3.0, Semantic Web languages, legal ontologies, and normative multi-agent systems are designed to cover new regulatory needs. Conceptual models for complex regulatory systems shape the characteristic features of rules, norms, and principles in different ways. This article outlines one of such multilayered governance models, designed for the CAPER platform, and offers a definition of Semantic Web Regulatory Models . It distinguishes between normative-SWRM and institutional-SWRM. It (...) also compares existing principles in privacy by design, linked open data , legal information institutes , and online dispute resolution . The article concludes by proposing the notion of Relational Law to summarize the ethical dimension of SWRM. Ethics are the only regulatory way to constitute a global space, out of the jurisdictional public domain set by national, international, or transnational law, and opposed to the private one. (shrink)

A method for sharing private data through personalized searches is described. This method enables users to retrieve access-controlled private data as well as publicly available data by submitting a single query to a conventional search engine. Seamless integration of the method into current search services through a prototype on the Mozilla Firefox web browser, without any changes to existing search functions, such as crawling, indexing, and matching, is also described. Evaluations showed that the additional storage requirement is only 10% (...) and that the system implementing the method responds in 10 s with 1,000 dummy results for anonymization. (shrink)