User Empowerment Technologies to Address Online Privacy Concerns

Lorrie Cranor

                     AT&T Labs -- Research
                    lorrie@research.att.com
A number of effort have been launched to help individuals better understand and control the use and disclosure of their personal information when they go online. These efforts include developing vocabularies to fairly and accurately represent privacy practices (IPWG); developing technologies that enable sites to express their privacy practices and users to seamlessly exercise preferences over them (P3); developing technologies that allow users to control the secure release of data (OPS); and offering services that offer assurances to users that practices are in fact being followed (TRUSTe). I will provide an overview of these efforts and discuss how they can work together and how they fit into the "big picture" of online privacy.