Accountability in internet transactions revisited

Accountability has been widely used in different perspectives and has many different terms and definitions. Accountability in management focuses on how organizations and persons effectively make use of their individual controls: external control (reward and punishment) and internal control (felt responsibility). Accountability in SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) focuses on how to disclose the message with security, privacy and liability and how to track evidence of the rendered services. In health care, accountability focuses on how to reveal patient's health record with privacy and security controls. For Internet transaction, accountability is to ensure how each party involves in performing a transaction that satisfies necessary security properties. In this paper, we conduct a survey of different perspectives of accountability to indicate that the definition of accountability for Internet transactions is limited. We study a number of research works which focus on accountability in several aspects and determine their advantages about accountability in Internet transactions.