Web Services Privacy Measurement Based on Privacy Policy and Sensitivity Level of Personal Information

Abstract

Web services technology has been in the mainstream of today’s software development. Software designers can select Web services with certain functionality and use or compose them in their applications with ease and flexibility. To distinguish between different services with similar functionality, the designers consider quality of service. Privacy is one aspect of quality that is largely addressed since services may require service users to reveal personal information. A service should respect the privacy of the users by requiring only the information that is necessary for its processing as well as handling personal information in a correct manner. This paper presents a privacy measurement model for service users to determine privacy quality of a Web service. The model combines two aspects of privacy. That is, it considers the degree of privacy principles compliance of the service as well as the sensitivity level of user information which the service requires. The service which complies with the privacy principles and requires less sensitive information would be of high quality with regard to privacy. In addition, the service WSDL can be augmented with semantic annotation using SAWSDL. The annotation specifies the semantics of the user information required by the service, and this can help automate privacy measurement. We also present a measurement tool and an example of its application.