Facilitating User Control in Distributed Collaborative Applications

Past years’ radical changes in how we use the World Wide Web led to new challenges in guarding user rights. The “Web 2.0” movement relies to large extents on commercial Web services where users can publish their content and manage their personal information. Experience has shown that the companies providing these Web services only then seek for standardized, open, and trustworthy solutions if it is beneficial for them. In order to empower users to take control over their content and their data, existing security models need to be extended to fit the new situation, and new types of services supporting user control need to be developed.