Profile Based Personalized Web Search

The information that we put online has no privacy what so ever and I’ve known that just never paid mind to it. If Google has all the search engines we use throughout the years what privacy is there? What is the whole purpose of keeping track of the information or the stuff we search? I do believe that there should be more laws concerning our privacy but how private will we be able to get. I don’t think that we have full privacy rights. At some extend we always end up sharing our information, either via online, via phone or via mail. I don’t think that there is much that can be done to protect an individual’s

In my opinion, the meaning of privacy of our personal data when we use online services on the Internet is different from what Google and other Internet companies are interpreting the meaning of Privacy to suit their business need to generate advertisement revenue by allowing companies to display advertisement relevant to the web search by their customer on their website.

In the past decade, a number of PPDM techniques have been proposed to facilitate users in performing data mining tasks in privacy-sensitive environments. Agrawal and Srikant [3], as well as Lindell and Pinkas [63], were the first to introduce the notion of privacy-preserving under data mining applications. Existing PPDM techniques can be classified into two broad categories: data perturbation and data distribution. Data Perturbation Methods: With these methods, values of individual data records are perturbed by adding random noise in such a way that the distribution of the perturbed data look very deferent from that of the actual data. After such a transformation, the perturbed data is sent to the Miner to perform the desired data mining tasks. Agrawal and Srikant [3] proposed the first data perturbation technique that could be used to build a decision-tree classifier. A number of randomization-based methods were later proposed [6, 33, 34, 73, 104]. Data perturbation techniques are not, however, applicable to semantically- secure encrypted data. They also fail to produce accurate data mining results due to the addition of statistical noises to the data. Data Distribution Methods: These methods assume that the dataset is partitioned eitherhorizontallyorverticallyanddistributedacrossdifferentparties. The parties

Whenever you are talking about privacy on the internet it is something that can't be taken lightly. With one click all of your information is put into a network, and you never know who’s hands it could end up in. First you must always question if a page needs your information. Why would they need to know who you are? Second, if you do happen to give them your information you must also consider where that information will go or end up.

Privacy is something that most people believe is not possible on the internet, but with the correct knowledge it can be possible. In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty”, he states that “It is very easy to find information about people on the internet, even private things that people don’t expect others to be able to see” (538). People don’t realize that what they do online can affect their personal lives such as their credit score, the ads that are recommended to them, and even the cookies in their computer. While Carr may have great points, he may not have considered the ways people do have privacy. There are some ways to protect browsing, people just need to know how. Most browsers have a mode that allows people to visit sites without being tracked. There’s no history, and no cookies.

Privacy in this era is threatened by the growth in technology with capacity that is enhanced for surveillance, storage, communication as well as computation. Moreover, the increased value of this information in decision making is one of the insidious threats. For this reason, information and its privacy are actually threatened and less privacy is assured.

This is the search box that is displayed in Google or Firefox when we wish to look up information about a particular topic of interest. Whenever we type a word or a topic of interest into the search box section indicated by the word “Search”, we transmit information about ourselves and our interest at the execution of that search. Advertisers see that search engine box request and gather information about our interest in an effort to contact us relating to that topic of interest. As a result of the search, they then solicit us to provide their services (Poritz, 2007). Information is being transmitted every time we type our subject of interest in the search engine box. The search engine creates a log file of our interest and advertisers obtain information about us from that particular search engine provider. It is not likely that the gathering of PII will cease in the near future. Search engines will continue to log and create files for usage by companies relating to our interest. Knowledge of how PII is transmitted and what we can do to minimize our contribution when surfing the web, will assure that information about us is distributed in a matter that is acceptable (Poritz, 2007). In general, items such as social security numbers, driver license numbers, birth records, race, and sex are all considered sensitive PII (Homeland Security, 2011).

Over the past few years, the development of the Internet and the intrusive surveillance capabilities of these technologies have caused privacy to become a major political and social issue for millions of Americans who go online.  Companies employ a variety of tools to gather marketable information on American citizens.  Most of the use of this information is for personalized advertisement and to create databases of target audiences.  While these activities may appear to be nothing more than annoyances for a majority of Americans, there is the hidden danger of the loss of privacy.

Privacy is an increasing issue that is at the heart of many debates, companies like Facebook profit form the oversharing of personal information because of targeted advertising. To illustrate, let’s say that you were online shopping, and you look up ‘red dress’, then you log on to Facebook. Facebook will show

Internet privacy, a subset to computer privacy, involves the mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information relating to oneself via Internet. The controversy of privacy concern has being articulated form the beginnings of large scale computer sharing. According to Maureen Dorney in her article, “Privacy and the Internet” she states that in 1993 there were already 83% of Americans that were concerned with threats to personal privacy. In fact, this was not the only year in which data was collected. She adds that in 1970 there were an increasing number of populations being threat of privacy violations. Since then, the controversy prompted several members of congress to call for increased privacy protection for data

Internet privacy is the security and privacy level of personal data published through the Internet. It is a broad term that refers to a number of technologies, factors and techniques used to protect sensitive and private data, preferences and communications (Abbott,

Organizations must conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for any new projects, new application development, existing critical applications that store or process personal information and also to changes to business processes or IT processes. A PIA describes the story of an application or system, database or other initiative and helps manage privacy impacts. Organizations must capture the flow of personal data within the enterprise landscape through a data flow diagram to analyze the possible privacy impacts on the privacy of individuals. The outcome of PIA must recommend options for privacy impacts remediation. The PIAs should analyze and describe:

statistical analysis) in contrast with personalized methods recommend item/s without considering any personal information or previous actions of users. In other words, it does not care about the taste of individual customers. For example, recommending a newly released movie or the most famous movie to all users. This type of recommendation is automatic and ephemeral (Schafer, Konstan, & Riedl, 1999). Personalized recommendation methods may require the user to be logged in, store user profile and have different comfortable suggestions for each user depending on their desires and how they behave in the past. This type of recommendation is persistent personalization. The collaborative filtering method is an example of personalized advice. Furthermore, a recommendation may be based on current session, does not need to store user profiles and have the same recommendation for all users. This type of recommendation is non-persistent and non-ephemeral. An example of this kind of recommendation is content-based filtering recommendations. (Kazienko & Ko\lodziejski, 2005; Schafer et al., 1999)

Privacy either encourages or is a necessary factor of human securities and fundamental value such as human embarrassment, independence, distinctiveness, freedom, and public affection. Being completely subject to mutual scrutiny will begin to lose self-respect, independence, distinctiveness, and freedom as a result of the sometimes strong burden to conform to public outlooks.

Personal privacy today is a controversial and complex topic, which is influenced by a number of factors. There is an integral role that databases play in this highly debated topic. The fact that many people now carry out their transactions electronically is another important factor. There is also pressure on personal privacy for increased national security around the world to combat terrorism. In addition, personal privacy is even threatened by commercial factors and the Internet.