earticle

영어

In consumer communications, entities, i.e., users, hand-held devices, etc., that connect to or interact with each other may know little about each other or without any prior knowledge. Therefore, in many applications, before a serious interaction begins, certain level of trust must be established between the interacting entities, which may require that some information that may contain privacy about the entities be exchanged between the entities. Thus, privacy protection and trust establishment are inter-related issues that should be properly balanced to ensure both smooth communication and proper privacy protection. In this paper, we focus on trust based privacy protection in consumer communications by elaborating on three key issues: (1) quantification of privacy, (2) characterization of the relationship between privacy and trust, and (3) influence of trust on privacy protection. With trust based privacy protection, prior to an interaction, entities can set their privacy preferences conveniently and, during the interaction, they can choose their policies freely such as specifying whether privacy protection takes a higher priority than trust establishment, or vice versa. Our analysis and simulation experiment show that through using proper privacy protection patterns, trust based privacy protection can satisfy diverse privacy protection requirements in consumer communications.