Privacy-Enhancing Technologies - approaches and development

In this paper, we discuss privacy threats on the Internet and possible solutions to this problem. Examples of privacy threats in the communication networks are identity disclosure, linking data traffic with identity, location disclosure in connection with data content transfer, user profile disclosure or data disclosure itself. Identifying the threats and the technology that may be used for protection can provide satisfactory protection of privacy over general networks that are building today the information infrastructure. In general, these technologies are known as Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This article analyses some of the key Privacy-Enhancing Technologies and provides view in the on-going projects developing these technologies. D 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.