Current and future privacy enhancing technologies for the Internet

This paper presents an overview of the current and next solutions for privacy protection on the Internet. We highlight five categories of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). First, we introduce the multiple virtual identities that can represent a person, and the way the person can manage them. Then, we focus on the untraceability problem, which has been a major field of research since the very first papers on privacy protection in the early eighties. Anonymous access to services will be the central point of the third category of PETS we consider. To complete this overview, we describe the current and future authorization pets, and finish by a presentation of personal data management. For each of these categories we present some of the current technologies and the most promising ones under development.