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B. Lang:
"Risks and State of the Art in Privacy and Trust";
Betreuer/in(nen): A. Tjoa, T. Neubauer; Institut für Softwaretechnik und Interaktive Systeme, 2009; Abschlussprüfung: 03/2009.

The WWW offers easy access to information. Few keystrokes and mouse clicks suffice to
catch up on certain topics a user may be interested in. Modern technologies also offer
(cheap) ways for people to communicate with users all over the world. Writing email
messages, entering chat sessions or even browsing one´s favorite website may not stay
as private as most people think though. Businesses already discovered possibilities for
advertising products by monitoring people´s browsing behavior; moreover, hackers may be
able to steal sensitive data, even without people´s knowledge.
This thesis will cover different aspects of privacy issues. The first chapter will focus on
privacy in general and how the attitude toward it changed in history and after September
11 2001, respectively. Measures and laws related to privacy in the US and Europe will be
compared (e.g. juristic approaches to foreigners, measures allowed during prosecutions)
and critiques triggered by changes after 9/11 are introduced.
The main matter of this thesis will concentrate on risks and threats (e.g. spyware, data
mining, collection of data) to privacy and sensitive data. Users are often not aware of
the extent of these threats when using the WWW. To counter the issues related to these
risks, Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) aim to improve the protection of private
information. Different PETs, which provide different levels of anonymity, are introduced
and discussed. These PETs include anonymizers that mask a user´s IP-address as well as
pseudonymizers, which help to manage online identities.
The final chapters deal with future challenges concerning PETs, which still need to be
taken into account, and several current examples of privacy issues.