Consistent, yet anonymous, Web access with LPWA
Eran Gabber, Phillip B. Gibbons, David M. Kristol, Yossi Matias, Alain J. Mayer · Communications of the ACM · 1999
In recent years the World Wide Web (WWW) has become an immensely popular and powerful medium. To attract more users, many web-sites o er personalized services, whereby users identify themselves and register their information preferences. On return visits, they conveniently receive a personalized selection of information. However, personalized services raise user concerns with respect to convenience and privacy. Registration for these services lets information providers use a variety of tools to collect extensive pro les of users who visit their web-sites. Moreover, registering typically requires the user to specify a unique username and a secret password. Upon each return visit, the user must provide the same username and password. Sound security would dictate that users choose (and remember!) a di erent password for each site. An additional problem arises when naive users choose the same user name and password for a web-site (e.g., for my.yahoo.com) as they use for their own company's computers, thus potentially providing an intruder an easy way to break into the company's intranet. Many sites ask for an e-mail address at registration time as well, which they use both to verify the user's registration, and, often, to provide part of the personalized service, such as a newsletter or a personalized news digest. For example, the travel site expedia.com e-mails best fares for userpreferred