Accountable systems : enabling appropriate use of information on the Web

Abstract

.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 In each instance, outdated laws combined with current technology provides little reassurance to information providers, and may have damaging side effects.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.