ABSTRACT
In 1997, with Wagner and Brewer, and again in 2002, we looked at the then-current state of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) for the Internet [26,27]. Now, in 2007, we are taking a third look. Technologies to help users maintain their privacy online are as important today as ever before—if not more so. Identity theft is the fastest-growing crime in the United States today [47] and it is all too easy for would-be identity thieves to harvest personal information from the online trails Internet users leave every day. Losses of large databases of personal information are an almost daily occurrence [2]; for example, retailers’ servers are penetrated [44], databases are traded between government and private companies [36], and laptops containing Social Security numbers are stolen [35].
