A Privacy-Protecting Business-Analytics Service for On-Line Transactions

Bettina Berendt, Sören Preibusch, Maximilian Teltzrow
2008 International Journal of Electronic Commerce  
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
more » ... ndardized developer software for Web services, but the second must consider 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 reidentification 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 system was tested on a large data set from a major European multichannel retailer.
doi:10.2753/jec1086-4415120306 fatcat:mftwqphsszfitke2t5uaf4dpgq