While traveling the data highway through the global village, most people, if they think about it at all, consider privacy a non-forfeitable right. They expect to have control over the ways in which their personal information is obtained, distributed, shared, and used by any other entity. According to recent surveys, privacy, and anonymity are the fundamental issues of concern for most Internet users, ranked higher than ease-of-use, spam, cost, and security.

Digital Privacy: Theory, Techniques, and Practices covers state-of-the-art technologies, best practices, and research results, as well as legal, regulatory, and ethical issues. Editors Alessandro Acquisti, Stefanos Gritzalis, Costas Lambrinoudakis, and Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati, established researchers whose work enjoys worldwide recognition, draw on contributions from experts in academia, industry, and government to delineate theoretical, technical, and practical aspects of digital privacy. They provide an up-to-date, integrated approach to privacy issues that spells out what digital privacy is and covers the threats, rights, and provisions of the legal framework in terms of technical counter measures for the protection of an individual?s privacy. The work includes coverage of protocols, mechanisms, applications, architectures, systems, and experimental studies.

Even though the utilization of personal information can improve customer services, increase revenues, and lower business costs, it can be easily misused and lead to violations of privacy. Important legal, regulatory, and ethical issues have emerged, prompting the need for an urgent and consistent response by electronic societies. Currently there is no book available that combines such a wide range of privacy topics with such a stellar cast of contributors. Filling that void, Digital Privacy: Theory, Techniques, and Practices gives you the foundation for building effective and legal privacy protocols into your business processes.