Personal Information Management and Distribution

With the increasing importance of the Internet as a channel for conducting business, protecting consumer privacy has become a critical challenge. Privacy protection deals with methods giving the data owner control of his data so that he can decide when and to what extend he wants to disclose his information, and then enforcing the user’s privacy preferences, either through technology, business practice or laws. This paper presents a software component architecture that enables individuals and companies to manage, use, and distribute personal data according to privacy preferences of individuals. We call these components myPrivacy. In an enterprise privacy architecture solution, the myPrivacy components can be used by enterprises to set, enforce, and monitor access to customer information according to privacy policies agreed to by the customer. The components can also support contacting the customer for consent, and allowing the customer access to their data and policies.