Enforcing User Privacy in Web Applications Using Erlang

Social networking applications on the web handle the personal data of a large number of concurrently active users. These applications must comply with complex privacy requirements, while achieving scalability and high performance. Applying constraints to the flow of data through such applications to enforce privacy policy is challenging because individual components process data belonging to many different users. The authors introduce a practical approach for uniformly enforcing privacy requirements in such applications using the actor-based Erlang programming language.