Accountable systems : enabling appropriate use of information on the Web

.The Web is plagued by problems of privacy and piracy. In each instance, outdated laws combined with current technology provides little reassurance to information providers, and may have damaging side effects. To meet this challenge, we have designed, built, and tested and present a new architecture for information exchange on the Internet called HTTPA (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol with Accountability). In this 'Accountable' architecture, information use is tracked from its creation through its modification, repurposing and republishing with the help of the 'Provenance Tracking Network', a decentralized network of peers that together record the rules governing resources on the Web, coupled with how these resources are shared and used. We found that the accountable systems framework provides an attractive compromise where the rights and abilities of parties to control access and use is balanced against the burden of restrictions imposed for two prototype applications; one dealing with privacy in healthcare, and the other with rights in photo sharing. Healthcare patients given the ability to be notified of use of their medical records judged that they had sufficient privacy protection, while doctors obtained easier access to the records. Providers of photos could be assured their images were not being misused, without the many drawbacks that digital rights management (DRM) systems impose on those consuming the material. In a similar vein in which the growth of e-commerce Web sites led to the massive adoption of HTTPS, we envision that over time HTTPA will be accepted by the larger Web community to meet the concerns of privacy and copyright violations on the Web.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Seneviratne, Oshani Wasana

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tim Berners-Lee and Lalana Kagal.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/93833

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/93833