Privacy Monitoring and Enforcement in a Web Service Architecture (WSA)

Abstract

The growth of online activities in our daily lives has led to substantially increased attention on how organizations and their computer systems handle Personal Information (PI). Independently, the wide adoption of Web Service Architecture (WSA), for the integration of software, creates an opportunity to facilitate support for privacy by monitoring the use of PI by web services and enforcing applicable privacy policies.

This thesis designs an agent for privacy monitoring and enforcement in a WSA environment and creates a prototype as a proof of concept. The agent is based on a specific multi-agent architecture for privacy compliance. The design of the agent has led to extension of the architecture to bring out its full potential in monitoring PI flows and enforcing privacy policies in a WSA environment. The evaluation of the prototype has led to suggestions on its implementation for an operational environment.