Safeguarding against new privacy threats in inter-enterprise collaboration environments

Inter-enterprise collaboration has become essential for the success of enterprises. As competition increasingly takes place between supply chains and networks of enterprises, there is a strategic business need to participate in multiple collaborations simultaneously. Collaborations based on an open market of autonomous actors set special requirements for computing facilities supporting the setup and management of these business networks of enterprises. Currently, the safeguards against privacy threats in collaborations crossing organizational borders are both insufficient and incompatible to the open market. A broader understanding is needed of the architecture of defense structures, and privacy threats must be detected not only on the level of a private person or enterprise, but on the community and ecosystem levels as well. Control measures must be automated wherever possible in order to keep the cost and effort of collaboration management reasonable. This article contributes to the understanding of the modern inter-enterprise collaboration environment and privacy threats in it, and presents the automated control measures required to ensure that actors in inter-enterprise collaborations behave correctly to preserve privacy. Computing Reviews (1998) categories and subject descriptors: C.2.4 Computer-communication Networks: Distributed Systems H.5.3 Information Interfaces and Presentation: Group and Organization Interfaces K.4.4 Computers and Society: Electronic Commerce K.6.5 Management of Computing and Information Systems: Security and Protection General terms: Design, Management, Security Additional key words and phrases: Privacy, Inter-enterprise Collaboration, Threats, Trust, eContract Control