Identity management tools for protecting online privacy

We use the Internet for shopping, staying in contact with friends, paying our bills, and declaring our taxes -- for almost everything. Thereby we emit a lot of sensitive information that is exchanged, processed, and stored at many different places. Sometimes we release our information voluntarily and consciously but quite often also unconsciously and unnoticed. In any case, once released, we can impossibly control the dispersal of this information, let alone remain aware where the information about us is stored and processed. However, the press reports daily on incidents where sensitive information has been lost, stolen, or misused -- often even information originally collected by large and reputable organizations. This situation puts our privacy and security at risk.

Fortunately, there exist a fair number of privacy-enhancing technologies which can help in minimizing the amount of information that needs to be revealed in transactions, on the one hand, and in limiting the information's dispersal, on the other hand. Examples are the privacy-enhancing technologies developed by the PrimeLife project. PrimeLife was a three year project funded by the European Commission and involved about 50 participants from 15 academic, industrial and public organizations. PrimeLife's goals were threefold: first, to make the existing research results and technologies available and useable, second, to fill the gaps between research prototypes and the requirements of practical applications, and third, to invent and develop new solutions to the privacy issues raised by the recent Internet applications such as social networks, cloud storage, and wikis.

In this talk we will present and discuss a number of results from the PrimeLife project. These include, for instance, the social network Clique url{clique.primelife.eu} where users can easily determine the audience of their postings, a concept that has found its way in Google+, and our tool Scamble! which ensure by encryption that indeed only the intended audience is able to decrypt a user's posting. We will further review PrimeLife's efforts to make privacy-enhancing technologies available and finally briefly discuss its successor ABC4Trust which will conduct two pilots with the privacy preserving credential technologies Identity Mixer and U-Prove.

For more information we refer to the books by PrimeLife and its predecessor PRIME summarizing their results [1,2] and to their respective websites www.primelife.eu and www.prime-project.eu. Information on the ABC4Trust project is found at www.abc4trust.eu.