Privacy Aspects of Mashup Architecture

Evolution of Web 2.0 applications has changed the outlook of business models and companies. Organizations need to rethink their communication, marketing and sale channels and how their employees and customers interact together internally and externally. Following this new trend, they also need to adopt their IT infrastructure and enhance their online presence and services in order to stay competitive in their businesses. Through this technological transition to Web 2.0 paradigm new security and privacy issues arise which should be taken into consideration to protect the whole Rich Internet Application (RIA) components. Web 2.0 has also introduced new possibilities for a better human computer interaction via rich internet applications such as Mashups that provide a user-driven micro-integration of web-accessible data. At the moment Mashups are mainly used for less important tasks such as customized queries and map-based visualizations; however they have the potential to be used for more fundamental, complex and sophisticated tasks in combination with business processes. In this paper, the security and privacy aspects of Mashup Architecture and some existing challenges will be discussed in more details.