Towards a user mitigated trade of privacy for web services

Privacy (broadly speaking) in the electronic age has become a valuable commodity as pointed out in [1]. Theoretical investigations of computational privacy games have been dominated by database centric models epitomized by the -differential privacy model introduced and developed by Dwork et all [5]. The inherent connections between privacy cryptography and mechanism design has also been emphasized in [2]. The database perspective on privacy focuses on providing anonimity garranties. In the present discussion we take up issue with some basic and often implicit assumption of the prevaling computational privacy paradigm. The individual user must entrust the database adminisatrator to implement users privacy policies. The goal of mechanism design for privacy should be to achieve a variant of "thruthfullness" inspired by mechanism designs for auctions. The variation amoung users privacy policy preferences are negligible. There exist no conflict of interest in the either of the participant roles that is either the beneficiary of the web services users and the providers of the services. We suggest here that assuming that the web service market is set up in such a way as to promotes competition amoung the various service providers, it is easily possible for the users to conveniently implement and manage their privacy policies whithout entrusiting such policies to the service providers.