A Privacy-Protecting Business-Analytics Service for On-Line Transactions
Bettina Berendt, Sören Preibusch, and Maximilian Teltzrow
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 12, Number 3, Spring 2008, pp. 115.
Abstract: Analysis of consumer-related and consumer-generated data is a very important way to measure the success of on-line retailing. The software packages for data analysis have two major shortcomings: (1) solutions are not offered as a service reachable by standard procedures over the Internet, but as isolated standalone applications or ERP system modules; (2) privacy restrictions need to be integrated into a framework of business analytics for Web retailers. The first aspect can be addressed with stan-dardized developer software for Web services, but the second must con-sider privacy legislation, privacy specifications on Web sites (P3P), and data reidentification problems. These shortcomings are addressed by a proposed formal model of these problems and an implementation of the model as a declarative specification of privacy constraints, expressed as an extension of P3P. The constraints are complemented by a logic identifying the elements in a given set of Web analytics that might lead to data reiden-tification and therefore violate implicit privacy constraints. A Web-based service is presented that uses these components to automatically adapt the set of available Web analytics to an on-line retailer’s P3P policy. The sys-tem was tested on a large data set from a major European multichannel retailer.
Key Words and Phrases: Data mining, electronic business, P3P, privacy, Web analytics.