Towards Hippocratic Log Files

The World Wide Web (WWW) is fast becoming the central location for goods, services and information. The very factors that make the Internet such a powerful medium combine to make the Internet a treasure trove of personal information regarding individual Web users. This has lead to internet users voicing concerns over the loss and violation of privacy. Inspired by the Hippocratic Oath, Agrawal, Kiernan, Srikant, and Xu (2002) introduced the concept of Hippocratic database systems. A founding tenet of such systems is that they should be responsible for the privacy of data they manage. Ten principles of Hippocratic database systems have been defined. The primary focus of this paper is to determine to which extent these same principles can be applied to log files. Once this is done, an architecture for the implementation of Hippocratic log files is introduced and discussed.