Reflecting User Privacy Preferences in Context-Aware Web Services

Personalization or privacy control? is a question one frequently asks himself/herself nowadays with the wide spread of service provision for users on the move. The right to protect intimacy or the right of privacy is a permanent and genuine right of any person. Context-awareness, offering to users services that react proactively to user environment and service conditions, although desirable, breaks into the private sphere. In the Internet world Web Services are usually employed as building blocks in such context-aware applications. In this paper, the reflection of user privacy preferences in the provision of context-aware Web Services is addressed. A user privacy preferences language for context-aware Web Service environments, namely Consumer Privacy Language (CPL), is proposed along with an adaptation mechanism for SOAP messages. The adaptation remains transparent to the end-user, who can profit from Web Services offering both context- and privacy-awareness.