Privacy Protection by Anonymizing Based on Status of Provider and Community

Abstract

When a user receives personal services from a service provider, the service can be of a higher quality if the user pro-vides more personal information. However, the risk of privacy violation could increase. Therefore, this paper proposes a privacy protection method that realizes avoidance of unwanted informa-tion disclosure by controlling disclosable attributes according to the results from monitoring two elements: user background in-formation of the provider and user community status. This is done before disclosing individual attributes corresponding to the privacy policy (i.e., the required anonymity level) by each user. The system architecture based on the aforementioned is also pro-posed. The validity of the proposed methods was confirmed by a desk model.