Estimating the Privacy Protection Capability of a Web Service Provider

The growth of the Internet has been accompanied by the growth of Web services (e.g., e-commerce, e-health, etc.), leading to important provisions put in place to protect the privacy of Web service users. However, it is also important to be able to estimate the privacy protection capability of a Web service provider. Such estimates would benefit both users and providers. Users would benefit from being able to choose (assuming that such estimates were made public) the service that has the greatest ability to protect their privacy (this would in turn encourage Web service providers to pay more attention to privacy). Web service providers would benefit by being able to adjust their provisions for protecting privacy until certain target capability levels of privacy protection are reached. This article presents an approach for estimating the privacy protection capability of a Web service provider and illustrates the approach with an example.