Personalization in user profiling: Privacy and security issues

Due to the sheer volume of data available on the Internet, the problem of information overload is an ever increasing one. Personalization systems based on user profiles tend to assist the user in his day-to-day tasks by recommending `relevant' content to the user based on his previous Web usage and navigation patterns. These user profiles hold more and more information about the user, his likes, dislikes as it learns about the user over time. Privacy and security issues of the `user profiles' becomes far the more important as the user profiles actually reflect the user itself albeit in a pseudo form.