Respecting User's Individual Privacy Constraints in Web Personalization

Web personalization has demonstrated to be advantageous for both online customers and vendors. However, its benefits may be severely counteracted by privacy constraints. Personalized systems need to take users' privacy concerns into account, as well as privacy laws and industry self-regulation that may be in effect. In this paper, the authors first discuss how these constraints may affect web-based personalized systems. They then explain in what way current approaches to this problem fall short of their aims, specifically regarding the need to tailor privacy to the constraints of each individual user. They present a dynamic privacy-enhancing user modeling framework as a superior alternative, which is based on a software product line architecture.