ABSTRACT
In the age of big data, information leakage through (un)intentional exposures and accountability of data usage pose serious threats to organizations and individuals. With the proliferation of Internet technology in modern applications, enormous volumes of data are generated every minute such as health records, airlines information, social networking, online shopping, weather forecasting, and so on. It has been observed that most of the users do not pay much attention to their data, for example, who stores their data, who else can access their data, who is liable if their data are misused, and so on? Importantly, the uprising usage of social networking and smartphones have made the situation worse. Any individual could disclose his friend’s personal data to others, even a user gives his own sensitive data to other application service providers for getting some free services temporarily. Furthermore, a (malicious) legitimate user could publish some sensitive information of others in social networking sites, which not only disclose the private information of organization/individual, but also harm others’ privacy. Many applications that share individuals’ identifying information with dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies either do not have a proper accountability of data access mechanism in place or they depend on a chaining outsourcing mechanism, which raises the privacy concern of individual. In this chapter, we discuss about the privacy and accountability concerns in big data applications, review the privacy and accountability issues in big data applications, and present a generic construction for addressing these concerns. The proposed construction allows consumers to access data from service provider in a controlled privacypreserving framework. The service provider will be able to identify the source of data leakages with the help of the proposed construction. The proposed construction can be extended further to other security features based on the applications’ requirements.
