User Privacy and Empowerment: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

Today, the service providers are capable of assembling a huge measure of user information using big data techniques. For service providers, user information has become a vital asset. The present business models are attentive to collect extensive users’ information to extract useful knowledge to the service providers. Considering business models that are slanted towards service providers, privacy has become a crucial issue in today’s fast-growing digital world. Hence, this paper elaborates personal information flow between users, service providers, and data brokers. We also discussed the significant privacy issues like present business models, user awareness about privacy, and user control over personal data. To address such issues, this paper also identified challenges that comprise unavailability of effective privacy awareness or protection tools and the effortless way to study and see the flow of personal information and its management. Thus, empowering users and enhancing awareness are essential to comprehending the value of secrecy. This paper also introduced latest advances in the domain of privacy issues like User-Managed Access (UMA) that can state suitable requirements for user empowerment and will cater to redefine the trustworthy relationship between service providers and users. Subsequently, this paper concludes with suggestions for providing empowerment to the user and developing user-centric, transparent business models.