Privacy Issues in SOAP Message Exchange Pattern for Social Services

A Web service is defined as an autonomous unit of application logic that provides either some business functionality or information to other applications through an Internet connection. Web services are based on a set of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) standards such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). NowadaysWeb services are becoming more and more popular for supporting different social applications, thus there are also increasing demands and discussions aboutWeb services privacy protection in information. In general, privacy policies describe an organization’s data practices on what information they collect from individuals (e.g., consumers) and what (e.g., purposes) they do with it. To enable privacy protection for Web service consumers across multiple domains and services, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a document called “Web Services Architecture (WSA) Requirements” that defines some specific privacy requirements for Web services as a future research topic. This paper presents a mathematical model to construct the privacy policies in SOAP Message Exchange Patterns (MEP) for social services. Further, this paper also presents the privacy policies in security tokens with SOAP messages.