Privacy as an Operating System Service

The issue of electronic privacy has of late attracted considerable attention. The proliferation of Internet services and, perhaps unavoidably, Internet crime, in conjunction with expanded government monitoring of communications has caused irreparable damage to the basic definition of privacy (the state or condition of being free from unwanted surveillance).

Implementing privacy in personal computer systems has traditionally been the domain of the paranoid computer specialist. In order for basic privacy to become pervasive among the non-technical user base, we believe that it must imitate the usage of other successful security (and other) services. Services like filesystem encryption, email and web security are successful because they are invisible to the user. Other services (not related to security) such as backups, networking, file searching, etc., also gain traction by being well integrated with the user's operating environment. In most cases, this means embedding such services in the OS.

In this work, we propose a new paradigm for implementing privacy, as an operating system service. We believe that privacy, similarly to other security services, is a service that has cross-application appeal and must therefore be centrally positioned.