Self-Protecting Access Control: On Mitigating Privacy Violations with Fault Tolerance

Introduction

The ability to execute multiple transactions across a myriad of applications has made the Internet a prime platform for building Web applications. Applications like Facebook (Facebook, 2010) and MySpace (MySpace, 2010), attest to this popularity and have been rated as being the most popular social networking applications in the English speaking world. Increasingly, business organizations are taking advantage of these social networking applications and other web applications to collect personal information about consumers and likewise consumers have shown a keenness for the web as a medium of communication because of the interactivity and fast response time it offers. Yet, the same qualities of flexibility and interactivity that the web is famous for have become an impediment in the face of the growing incidences of data privacy violations. For example, in October 2010 a Wall Street Journal Investigation revealed that many popular Facebook applications were transmitting consumer personal information to advertising and Internet tracking companies (Slattery, 2010), (Foremski, 2010). Cases like this have fueled growing concerns, on the part of consumers, that their data can be leaked without their consent to third parties. In this section, we discuss the context in which data privacy violations occur and why this happens in spite of the fact that access control mechanisms can be implemented to protect the information.